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Kraftwerk Concert Ticket Company Explains "Debacle," Scalpers Asking $42K

John Del Signore

Published Feb 23, 2012

Modified Feb 23, 2012

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John Del Signore

Published Feb 23, 2012

Modified Feb 23, 2012

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The CEO for the company that "handled" the "selling" of Kraftwerk tickets for the "group's" run of eight "performances" at MoMA has apologized for yesterday's debacle, in which basically "nobody" got tickets for the intimate shows. (And if you did score tickets, please STFU, ja?) According to a letter posted on the ShowClix website, CEO Joshua Dziabiak freely admits "we failed many of you." Will he resign over the scandal, then invite disgruntled Kraftwerk fans to publicly stone him to death? No. But he's real sowwwwy! The letter explains:

Dear Kraftwerk fans,

Sorry it took me a day to write this, but it was important for me to first understand all of the facts so they could be properly communicated. First and foremost, we are deeply sorry for the frustration and massive inconvenience that yesterday's on-sale for Kraftwerk caused for many of their great fans around the world. I recognize that so many of you spent hours in front of your computer watching a spinning wheel—or watching the page go blank. Please allow me to explain what happened and what we'll do to correct this for the future:

MoMA has been a really great partner of ShowClix for over a year now, and we've worked with them to move tens of thousands of tickets successfully. They leaned on us to help them with this on-sale, which was a special event for them, and we let them (and you) down. ShowClix has successfully executed many very large, high-demand on-sales over the past five years that we've been in business. Most of these on-sales have a high demand, with a great deal of inventory to sell. Kraftwerk's eight-night performance on-sale was a very unique situation. While we're not able to disclose the number of tickets that were available for these performances, what I will say is that of the tens and tens of thousands of die-hard Kraftwerk fans from around the world that logged on at exactly noon EST yesterday to get these tickets, the venue capacity restrictions would only ever allow approximately 1.20% of them to actually be reserved. As you might imagine, this is an extremely large technical hurdle, particularly because of the tiny fraction of supply versus the demand.

Still, this is no excuse. We should have never advised MoMA to allow the tickets to be sold in the fashion in which they were, because in the end—even if everything were to go smoothly—many people would have been very disappointed. ShowClix didn't set the proper expectations from the beginning, nor did we properly prepare our load balancing servers in order to prevent the queue from timing out. Ultimately, we failed many of you.

Since yesterday, we have discovered that a single setting within one of the lower levels of our queuing system's middleware bubbled-up under the heavy load and caused frequent timeouts. There were also some issues with the broadcast system which allows us to communicate with ticket buyers while they're waiting in the queue. We should have both of these problems resolved by the end of this week. However, even with these problems resolved, it is my belief moving forward that we should not perform an on-sale all at once for an event or venue that has such small capacity restrictions versus potential demand. Instead, we will advise our clients on various alternative methods to fairly sell tickets to an event that has such a small fraction of inventory available versus the potential demand.

There were certainly technical problems around this event. Contrary to some reports, however, our servers never crashed or went offline, and none of our other clients or their events experienced a problem during the Kraftwerk on-sale. We always keep high-demand on-sales separate from all of the other activity happening on our server. It's also important to note that there were online sales successfully processing the entire time, and all eight of the events sold-out in approximately 60 minutes.

In closing, regardless of what the technical problem was—or how we plan to solve it in the future—we haven't overlooked the incredible amount of frustration many people felt from the on-sale. We take full responsibility. This company was founded and continues to be run by a big team of live entertainment and technology addicts. We feel for you, the fans, and our partner, MoMA, and vow to work hard to prevent such a debacle from happening again in the future.

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

Joshua Dziabiak

Ironically, ShowClix first attempt to link to the apology letter led Kraftwerk fans here. And the apology does not equal a ticket to see Kraftwerk, which has not appeared in NYC since 2005, when they blew everyone's minds at Hammerstein Ballroom. On Craigslist, desperation is running high. One fan pleads, "As my poor cat lay dying, she softly purred, "Please try and see Kraftwerk if they ever tour again. I love you." Help me out. I need this. I can't get her out of my head. I'll pay ANY price to see this show to bring peace to my aching heart and mind." One ticket scalping site currently has a single ticket on sale for $42,413, and College Humor reports that someone already paid thousands of dollars for these tickets:

(Via College Humor)

Tagged

concerts

kraftwerk

moma

showclix

John Del Signore

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Originally from the Albany area, John Del Signore has called NYC home since 1995. In addition to his thousands of meticulously-crafted bespoke blog posts for Gothamist, his writing has also been published in The Awl, Deadspin, The Nervous Breakdown, and performed at The Brick Theater in Brooklyn.

Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations

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