Comments on: James Murphy’s role in the LCD Soundsystem ticket fiasco

By: MarcBrubaker

MarcBrubaker — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 17:26:59 +0000

Your math is wrong – 1,915 is about 9.5% of the capacity.

And to echo what was said above, using Lehrmann as your only source, not talking to Murphy and apparently not contacting Bowery Presents either: all of this looks like sloppy journalism.

By: LEwing

LEwing — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 19:01:05 +0000

I’m not a fan of over paying for things either but let’s take a look at the facts:

1) MSG can hold 20,000 people at a concert.
2) StubHub sold 1,915 tickets to the event.

That’s less than 1% of the entire venue capacity!! Obviously the majority of tickets did NOT go to scalpers, StubHub, Premium Seats USA, Tickets Now, the secondary ticket market; whatever you want to call it. They either went to fans as LCD intended OR LCD held tickets back and got real shady with how they were selling tickets for way more than the “face value” they established and blamed the “scalpers” for the inflated prices.

A bunch of friends and I would have been shut out of this event had it not been for brokers. I thank the lord the brokers bought some seats when they could, otherwise I would have missed this show completely. I mean, who really has time to sit around and wait for a 9am on sale?! Some of us have jobs and other priorities that don’t always make it easy to get tickets the day they go on sale. You pay a little more but at least you’re not shut out.

By: danfrank1111

danfrank1111 — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 18:36:38 +0000

Agree with above commenters, this is terrible journalism. Sounds like a stub hub ad.

By: caitrosedev

caitrosedev — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 17:35:16 +0000

I read a couple of stories about the ticket fiasco, and I don’t think Mr Murphy’s hands are as dirty as Reuters implied. If the world works as they say it does, with the promoter holding back huge swaths of tickets and then dumping them on brokers, hangers on and the band, that still doesn’t mean the band had to be in cahoots. Maybe the band got a couple of hundred tickets of the thousands? Immediately booking the T5 gigs, and then imposing a delivery regimen that would discourage scalping seems to indicate that Murphy’s anger was genuine. After all, how often did LCD play big enough venues that he would be aware of how the deck is stacked against the lowly fan. And I’m not Machiavellian enough to believe that the whole enterprise was staged just to make a big pop.

By: tkrieg

tkrieg — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 04:33:50 +0000

Felix you miss as wide here as you did in your interview with Nick Denton at Paid Content. And the people at Bowery Presents were totally overwhelmed by the demand. And if you were to follow any kind of logic that he was doing it for money – wouldn’t he not be quitting at his peak.

By: MMDC

MMDC — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 18:59:11 +0000

“Just about everybody has asked James Murphy about all this, and he’s gone VERY quiet.”

The question wasn’t if everybody has asked him, the question was if YOU had asked him. By your dodgy response, it sounds like you haven’t.

By: sunnohh

sunnohh — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 18:50:59 +0000

I remember seeing them in Omaha at a basement venue below a medium sized venue for 5 dollars! Might have been ninety people there max.

By: FelixSalmon

FelixSalmon — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 17:44:16 +0000

Just about everybody has asked James Murphy about all this, and he’s gone VERY quiet.

By: tanukijones

tanukijones — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 00:48:30 +0000

I’m way too much of a skeptic to just roll with this. Two questions:

1. Did you attempt to ask James Murphy what he thinks about what Lehrmann told you here? If LCD was really using artificially low ticket prices at MSG, there’s no reason for him to flip out and then tack on four shows at Terminal 5 leading up to it for lower prices than the MSG show (and also with a very difficult will call-only ticketing system designed to stop reselling). That’s way too much work for him if he knows he can just raise the face value of MSG tickets and fix things that way. Something’s not adding up.

2. Did you try to get a source other than Lehrmann? This whole thing was a giant PR debacle for StubHub, to the point that they had to shut down their Facebook page temporarily because angry LCD fans were swarming it. Of course he’s going to want people to blame the band, or anyone else but StubHub, really.

By: GregHao

GregHao — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 07:51:29 +0000

it seems like in this instance, the scalper is the promoter! Or at least the promoter is enabling the scalping.

But you (and Felix) are right, the way to combat scalping is to raise the price. Or dutch auction.

By: KidDynamite

KidDynamite — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 21:45:07 +0000

Phish has jacked their ticket prices up to $75 for this year’s summer tour – up from $50 a few years ago. If people will pay it, it might as well go to the band and not the scalpers, right?

Springsteen combated this long ago by jacking up his ticket prices too.

Both Phish and Springsteen tickets still pretty much sell out.