Phish tickets on sale a week early?
Fans thought it was too good to be true when packages for the mega-popular jam band’s upcoming four-night stand at Red Rocks became available online Wednesday.
Turns out, it was.
Because of a human error at Ticketmaster, tickets for Phish’s Red Rocks dates popped up a week before schedule on the ticketing giant’s website — at 5 p.m. March 18, instead of noon this coming Thursday.
The news spread like wildfire on Phish messageboards, prompting eagle-eyed phans to snap up four-day passes en masse.
But a couple hours later, the tickets were taken off-sale and all orders were canceled.
“It was an inadvertent error on behalf of Ticketmaster that put this event on sale prior to the appropriate time,” said Dave Butler, the still-new president of Ticketmaster North America.
It wasn’t fair: To the fans who didn’t get a chance, or to the fans who got one (unexpectedly) only to be disappointed.
But there’s a happy ending — sort of.
“We wanted to do the right thing for the fans who purchased tickets and the ones who weren’t aware they had gone on sale and so we canceled the orders, which is our policy in situations like this,” Butler said.
Ticketmaster is granting the 1,900 Phish fans who placed orders at Red Rocks a $50 Ticketmaster gift card to offset their inconvenience — a move that will cost the ticketing giant $95,000 on top of the headache of dealing with the mess.
“I’m surprised,” said Kelli Smith of Columbus, Ohio, who purchased a single four-day pass for the Red Rocks shows and already had booked her hotel room in Colorado. “We knew they didn’t have to do anything. We’ve all looked at the policy today. But I think the fans will be fairly appreciative of this response from Ticketmaster.
“Plus, $50 equals one Phish ticket — if you’re lucky enough to get one.”
Other fans weren’t so amenable to Ticketmaster peace offering.
“This doesn’t get me tickets,” said Mindi Larkin, a 37-year-old phan in Littleton with 27 Phish shows under her belt. She had purchased two four-day passes. “This makes me want to never do business with Ticketmaster ever again, which means I’ll miss out on a lot of shows.”
The chaos started around 5 p.m. Wednesday, when an error was triggered in the ticketing behemoth’s website that allowed the sale of four-day Phish passes. Single tickets never went on sale.
“We had nothing to do with this, and we were totally caught off guard by it,” Chuck Morris and Don Strasburg, the president and senior vice president of AEG Live Rocky Mountains, said in a statement.
As the promoters of the Phish shows at Red Rocks, AEG Live’s offices took many emails and calls Thursday morning.
“We initially thought this was the band’s way of giving something back to the fans, their way of dodging the scalpers,” said Larkin, who went to bed Wednesday with a $410.65 hold on her debit card for the two four-day passes.
Larkin was confirmed for seats 89 and 90 in row 38 for the four shows. But when Larkin woke up Thursday, her order had been canceled at .
Phish released a statement on its website Thursday saying the mistaken on-sale had given “some fans an unfair advantage to purchase tickets ahead of the March 26th publicly announced on-sale date.”
That doesn’t change the heartbreak some fans felt Thursday.
“I was so incredibly elated last night,” said Tiffany McCoy, a fan in Columbus, Ohio, who purchased two four-day passes Wednesday night. “I went to bed with visions of Red Rocks in my head, and this morning I was drinking my coffee when I checked my account and saw that they were canceled. It was very disheartening.”
Ricardo Baca: 303-954-1394; rbaca@denverpost.com
