Tickets for Swedish D.J. Avicii’s Homecoming performance sold out just 35 minutes after they were made available Tuesday, making it Cornell Concert Commission’s fastest selling show to date.The roughly 4,800 tickets sold nearly an hour and a half more quickly than CCC’s previously fastest selling concert — an unexpected degree of success, according to Dave Rodriguez ’13, executive director of CCC.“I was expecting it to sell out today at the very least, but I wasn’t expecting to get quite as much traffic as we did. I was shocked,” Rodriguez said.Before Avicii, tickets for Lupe Fiasco, who played Barton Hall in April 2011, made Cornell concert history, selling out in roughly two hours. Second to that was KiD CuDi, who performed at Cornell in November 2010. The concert sold out in about seven hours, Rodriguez said.According to Rodriguez, CCC has been attentive to the student body’s interest and demand for Avicii. In the spring, the Slope Day Programming Board attempted to bring Avicii to Cornell for Slope Day 2012 — but Avicii was one of three musicians who turned down its offer to perform.For the homecoming performance, Avicii’s management wanted CCC to begin selling tickets exactly a month before the show, Rodriguez said. CCC postponed ticket sales to Tuesday to allow it to better promote the concert. Although Rodriguez said he was surprised by how fast tickets to Avicii’s show sold out, he said that concerts on Saturday nights — like Avicii’s — have traditionally sold out faster than other performances.“Also, homecoming is a big night of the year,” Rodriguez added.Though CCC would “love to accommodate more people,” Rodriguez said the only other venue that could host the concert on campus is Schoellkopf Stadium. Since 1972, however, when riots broke out at the stadium before a Deep Purple concert, it has not been open as a concert venue.CC adopted new ticket policies for the Avicii show in an effort to make ticket sales as fair as possible, Rodriguez said. The organization dropped the number of tickets available to each student and alumnus from four to two in order to allow more people to attend the concert. CCC will also now be requiring a valid photo ID matching the purchaser name printed on each ticket.
Original Author: Lianne Bornfeld