live nation died.

Unless you actually want tickets. In that case, you should probably go elsewhere.

***

As of about 10 minutes ago, I have a new whipping boy in the concert ticketing industry.

My hatred of Ticketmaster goes back a long way, but today, they’ve been supplanted by Live Nation, the service that sells tix for shows at the P-G Pavilion.

At 9:50 this morning, I was set up in front of my computer, credit card in hand, ready for the 10 a.m. on-sale for June’s Phish show out in Burgettstown. I didn’t expect this to go smoothly; the demand would be enormous, and I didn’t know if Live Nation’s servers had the horsepower to keep up.

After getting a couple of timeout messages, I got through to the order page. I wanted just two lawn seats, and thought my chances were pretty good. They were, as it turned out; the tix were in my cart, and all I had to do was type in an address and the card number.

In theory, anyway.

Somewhere between the address and the payment page, I discover that Live Nation can’t, in fact, hang. In fact, they crashed and burned like fucking rookies. When the error messages ceased, I got a short note saying I took too long to complete my order and my tickets had been released.

Wait. I took too long? I took too long while I was waiting for your fucking servers to figure out what was going on?

The list of reasons to hate Ticketmaster is long and thorough. I will, however, give them credit for this: Ticketmaster’s shit works. If you don’t get your tickets, it’s because they’re gone, and not because their servers are so hopelessly underpowered that they can’t handle a big push.

Live Nation? Pathetic. If you can’t hang with the big boys, either fix it so you can or fucking stay out of the way.

In the meantime: Anyone have an extra pair to see Phish on 6-18? Help a brother out.