However I disagree, you can alway compare last shows to other shows. It’s pretty easy to do just that. You’d have to imagine less than 1% of attendees will be flying in for a final show…let’s say on the high end 5%, it still seems unlikely that everyone who has seen this band ever in the NYC area will buy a ticket to fill out a venue more than 4x the size of T5.

And promoters always hold tickets back, always. The question in this case is how many the promoter held back.

With that said, anybody that thinks this is a “conspiracy” by James obviously does not have a grasp on how the ticket industry works as a whole. Furthermore, James’ entire rant, while I understand he was frustrated, was just absolutely ridiculous.

The truth of the matter is that there are about 4,000 active ticket brokers in the country, give or take a few hundred. Of those 4,000 brokers there are maybe less than 50 that actually have “bots” or automated computer programs that give them any sort of advantage when tickets go on sale to a popular live event. The media and artists love to talk about these programs like they are common, when in reality, they cost tens of thousands of dollars and are only owed by large brokers who have 7 figures to throw around freely without thinking twice. The rest of us buy tickets just like any other fan when onsales or pre-sales go live; we are just usually a little bit better at it because we buy tickets every single day multiples times a day whereas the average fan buys tickets to a popular event maybe once or twice a year.

In his rant, it is obvious that James of LCD Soundsystem does not understand tickets or how the industry works by saying things like “MSG holds 50,000 tickets but they are only having 13,000 seats available for our show.” I have no idea what planet he is living on, but at it’s FULLEST capacity, MSG holds 18,000 people. So if you have a public on-sale for a popular artist and each person buys an average of 2 tickets, that is 9,000 people buying 2 tickets when the event goes live. Seeing as how this was advertised heavily as James’ last show ever as LCD Soundsystem, I am sure fans from across the country and across the world made plans to be at this show. It does not surprise me at all that this sold out as quickly as it did, as LCD appeals to the hipster audience from 18-35, most of which have the money to travel to NYC for a show like this. This is not a regular New York show so you cannot compare it to any previous shows that LCD has done in NYC or otherwise. It is a LAST show. And people bought tickets at the rate of which it did because it was a last show.

Lastly, the MOST number of tickets that have been on the re-sale market for this show has not exceeded 400. And that is combining every broker’s tickets that they have listed across the country. 95% of the tickets on Stubhub are from brokers (SH does not actually hold tickets, they are just a marketplace) so that is included in that figure. So if James or any pissed off fan wants to sit around and blame brokers for selling this show out, they can. But the fact of the matter is that about 5% of the tickets were bought with the specific intent to re-sell them. The rest of the ticket sales, assuming none of the tickets were held back for any reason, went to dedicated fans across the world willing and ready to travel to see an artist they love play a final show at the most famous arena in the world.

More interesting, on The Bowrey Presents’ own web site the MSG show is not showing as sold out even though a ticketmaster search reflects that no tickets are available.

However, this begs a larger question…Let’s say assuming LCD can sell out Terminal 5 which isn’t a strecth. Can they sell out T5 4 times over and fill MSG? That has to assume every fan in the NYC area who has ever had interest in seeing them is going to attend the MSG show. If not, how many tickets is BP holding back? It would have to be thousands, 3K? 4K? 5K? Then how the hell do they sell all of those tickets? There are about 850 on stubhub right now, it would be difficult to sell thousands of tickets for this event in a span of 5 weeks. If they don’t they’ll take a significant loss on the MSG shows thus making the T5 shows a wash.

Agree with you on sound quality at Terminal 5. The same is true of sightlines. And location. And door management. And everything really. I have a theory that the opening of Terminal 5 marked the point at which Bowery Presents officially became evil. But I do still love Bowery Ballroom.

1) LCD Soundsystem doesn’t need a “last show” to sell out Terminal 5 for four nights in a row–they did it last year with no problem at the same $35 ticket prices. The sellouts weren’t instant, but they were fairly quick, and there was signficiant secondary market demand (average stubhub prices around $75-80, which for an all general admission show is a decent bump (since every ticket is the same and your are highly susceptible to individual undercutters0.
1a) LCD Soundsytem is big in NYC, but not so much elsewhere–they managed to not sell out the Wellmont Theatre this September. Wellmont is a considerably smaller venue than Terminal 5. (Their opening act–Sleigh Bells–just sold out both the Music Hall of Williamsburg and WebsteR Hall, so that should have only added to the demand).

2) LCD and Bowery Presents have a long history of hyping shows together–last year, LCD played a last minute show at the Music Hall of Williamsburg that sold out instantaneously (their first show supporting the new album), and a show at Webster Hall that sold out just as quickly. They used smaller venues to 1) “thank the fans”, and 2) generate buzz. Both sides know what they are doing in New York. The Music Hall of Williamsburg show was willcall only–LCD knows how to do ticketless, and so does Bowery Presents (see, e.g., Kanye West at the Bowery Ballroom in November).

3) The delay in getting the Terminal 5 shows actually set up (e.g., on the Bowery Presents website, available for purchase, etc) tends to go against the idea that this was all predetermined. Or that’s what they want us to think.

4) There are plenty of times that T5 is dark–see, e.g., the first two weeks of March (4 shows, maybe), the week of April 3, and almost the entire month of May. (Also, off-topic, let’s talk about how bad the sound quality is at that venue)

5) James has a history of making things up. (See, e.g., his 45:33 release):
“Would I lie to you?

Well I lied. I made [conceptual jogging soundtrack] 45:33 for Nike and I don’t even jog. I said I did but that was a total lie. I just wanted to make a record like E2-E4 by Manuel Göttsching. I was mourning that fact that music had changed and you could no longer make a record like that. I could have taken that into EMI but it’d be a bit pretentious. People expect songs. I wondered how I’d ever find the time and justification to do something like that, and that was perfect. But as far as running to test it, I didn’t even expect it to be for running. I wrote these liner notes which I find really funny but nobody seems to think they’re a joke. I’m not built to run. I’m built for fighting, not running away!”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2007/feb  /10/electronicmusic.features16

6) If Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga can’t sell out in 15 seconds (try 30-60, but they have a much broader audience and have been very, very good for most ticket brokers), then something was particularly screwy with this onsale.