On February 22nd, at noon, tickets to the MoMA’s Kraftwerk – Retrospective 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 went on sale. By 4:00 PM desperate aficionados were posting sweaty pleas on Craigslist offering to pay as much as $200 per.
The MoMA ticket portal on ShowClix, currently says “Sorry— Kraftwerk events have sold out! We appreciate your patience and understanding. Thank you!” But fans, drowning the Twitterspshere in bile were not feeling very patient or understanding, and now Craigslist abounds in ticket offers for as much as $2,000 per!
One seller, offering tickets to the best offer, writes, “Best offer gets it. No weirdness please, just cash.”
So what happened?
MoMA had apparently entrusted the online ticket sales to ShowClix, a small start-up ticketing company in Pittsburgh, which failed to anticipate the overwhelming demand they’d face when tickets to the MoMA’s tiny 1,000 seat atrium went on sale.
The band has not played in the U.S. for 17 years and has a rabid following. What’s more eight evening concerts meant only 8,000 tickets would be sold: so, with a virtual avalanche of buyers from around the word logging on at once, the ShowClix servers experienced what CEO Joshua Dziabiak called “frequent timeouts.” The tickets were sold out right away but successful buyers were unaware since very few of them were shown a final “thank you” screen.
Joshua Dziabiak, ShowClix CEO, offered an apology to those who “spent hours in front of your computer watching a spinning wheel—or watching the page go blank.”
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