No one got tickets to LCD Soundsystem's farewell show and now everyone is pissed
Anyone who’s glanced at their Twitter feeds this morning knows that the inability to purchase tickets to LCD Soundsystem’s Madison Square Garden farewell show rivals Mubarak’s exit for topic du jour. Following a presale that found hundreds of people standing in the cold outside New York’s Mercury Lounge only to walk away empty-handed, this morning’s official sale at 11 a.m. crashed the Bowery Presents website, left many others attempting to access a Ticketmaster system that refused to respond (and in some cases, “sold” them tickets only to take them away at the last second), and watching in confusion as the entire show sold out instantaneously.
We checked in with the band and its management, and while there’s no official word yet on what exactly happened, James Murphy has been tweeting his displeasure with what’s likely one of the major culprits: much-reviled scalping site StubHub. Murphy began laying into them last night, saying, “$1500 for a single ticket? Fuck you, scalpers. You are parasites. I HATE you,” adding, “I will try to figure a way out to fuck these fuckers. NO MATTER WHAT WE DO, IT IS NOT WORTH THAT KIND OF MONEY TO SEE US!”
He then took his complaints to the site directly, saying, “Eat shit @StubHub part of being a marketplace that connects buyers and sellers is giving fans the freedom to price tickets however they want… I pretty much guarantee 'fans' aren't pricing these tickets. You're barely legal and you know it.” Keep in mind this was all for just the presale; when fans failed to get tickets during today’s regular sale and then told him about it, Murphy promised he was currently “looking for clarity from Ticketmaster” and would pass along any info he could find, although he offered this in the meantime: “1 thought: if everyone breathes a sec, maybe it'll calm down, and shitbags will lower the $ on StubHub etc. I think hype is making it worse.” Of course, with tickets currently priced between $144 and $800 on the site, that doesn’t seem likely. (Interestingly, Yahoo floats the possibility that this is all the result of a scalper conspiracy, with the entire scalping community banding together in solidarity vindictively to bring down the show after Murphy threatened them. If that's the case, you have to admire the shitbags' organizational skills.)
UPDATE: The band has announced four more shows preceding the Madison Square Garden date, and Murphy has issued a statement on the whole matter that you can check out here.