Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism dude, at least Hitler made sure EVERYONE got tickets to the Nuremberg rally.
Thousands of area Kraftwerk fans are wondering what's the German word for ticket fail today, after tickets for the eight night stand at MoMA sold out faster than you can say shoot the glass. Just as Hitler predicted! The quick sellout says something about the high demand for a "group" that hasn't "performed" in NYC since 2005 at Hammerstein Ballroom. (HELL of a show.) MoMA used the website ShowClix to handle tickets for the sale, and many of us experienced time-outs and a debalitiating inability to even load Showclix.com for a while. After well over an hour in a queue, all Kraftwerk fans at Gothamist HQ were denied. But we weren't alone; let us collectively mourn this completely unsurprising turn of events with the soothing balm of a Twitter pity party:
That last Tweet there appears to be true; according to Nokturnalist, while most of us were dutifully trying to by tickets through computing, others picked up the telephone and found success. Clever bastards. At one point during the 90 minutes of anxiety, @ShowClix Tweeted, "Kraftwerk tickets are flying off the shelf. Auto-refreshing won't help u within the 50,000 concurrent connections our engineers are seeing."
We reached out to the MoMA press office for comment, but haven't heard back yet. They're all probably still trying to score tickets for themselves; as one MoMA employee Tweeted, "Take heart, Interwebs: not even MoMA staff is immune to #Kraftwerk ticket FAIL. Success rate in the office near zero." If only there was a German word for taking comfort in the misfortune of others...
UPDATE: While you were waiting in the queue, robots got all the tickets:
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In the thousand+ social media interactions I've read today about ShowClix, MoMA, Kraftwerk, ticket fails, etc. I only came across 20 (maybe) that spoke to actually succeeding in purchasing the tickets. My question is: where are all the tickets? There's no way scalpers got around this because there are no physical tickets (will call only). Did their bots just eat up all these tickets w/o knowing about the policy? If so, will those tickets go to waste?
pete_mac
Stubhub tickets are mostly put there by the venue NOT scalpers. And there's no laws that says they can't. Same goes for every sports team in NY. Release 10% (or whatever), they 'sell out" then sell for triple on Stubhub. Then blame scalpers.
Emmily_Litella
Kraftwerk are incredibly over rated. Interesting stuff but... Art of Noise was the shit.
The tickets - supposedly a two ticket maximum per person - are only available via Will Call the night of the show, and the buyer needs to show ID and the card used in the purchase. How are the scalpers getting around this?
I can guarantee you most of the tickets were picked by scalpers, who immediately put them on Stubhub for triple the price. It's the same thing that happened when I tried to snag tickets for the Refused reunion show. It's ridiculous.
SeasTooFarToReach
If they were human scalpers it'd be a different story, but these ticket sites are simply bombarded by robots snatching hundreds of tickets.
i got a tickets to man machine nana nana boo boo stick your head in doo doo !!!
Harper324
the idea behind ShowClix is great. the technology at ShowClix could be a lot better if (1) they had an adequate number of servers; and (2) let you know your place in the queue - that way you know if you have time to go to the bathroom/get a drink of water/etc.
i miraculously arrived at the ticket buying page, but then kept receiving error messages or time outs. after about 20-30 mins of this nonsense - and just as i was about to give up altogether - i finally was able to purchase tix.
SeasTooFarToReach
Don't worry! I'm sure StubHub will be swarming with tickets.
ShowClix announced on Twitter at 1:00 that all shows were sold out. Nearly three hours later, my browser is still refreshing and telling me I'm in the queue.
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