Student tickets for pop artist Ke$ha’s Sept. 29 performance at Cornell sold out within hours Wednesday morning — leaving some students victorious and other diehard fans disappointed.
Approximately 4,000 tickets were sold between 9 a.m., when tickets went on sale, and about 11:30 a.m., when the last student ticket was sold, according to Peter Schwartz ’14, executive director of the Cornell Concert Commission.
High traffic on the ticket sales website — which is managed by the University — caused problems for some users. Some students were met with websites that loaded too slowly, while others ran into a status on the website saying the tickets were sold out when they were not, according to Schwartz.
These problems arose even though the University anticipated high traffic and dedicated an entire server to ticket sales, Schwartz said.
One of the students initially left disappointed by Wednesday morning’s ticket sales was Jackie Yang ’16, who said she was upset when she saw a status saying tickets had sold out.
“I made it a point to get to class early so that I could grab a seat and get my Ke$ha tickets, but as soon as I logged into the website, it said it was sold out,” she said.
For Yang, persistence paid off. She continued to refresh the website for 15 minutes while taking notes in class to see if tickets were still available — and then saw she was able to buy a ticket.
“By that point, I felt pretty pathetic, but it was worth it,” Yang said. “Hopefully, the concert will be worth it, too.”
Another student, Hannah Dorsey ’16, was also affected by the website’s slow load times and saw the effect of the website’s troubles on Facebook upon seeing posts by other students.
“The checkout process was really slow, but I got my ticket after a few minutes,” she said. “I bought my first one at 9:04, and after, when I got on Facebook, everyone was complaining about them being sold out.”
Dorsey — who wanted to buy an additional ticket to see whether or not they were actually sold out — was not able to buy a second ticket immediately and had to keep refreshing her web browser until it became available.
“I ended up buying my second ticket at 9:18 because I was patient and good at hitting refresh while everyone else was freaking out about the website saying they were sold out,” she said.
Schwartz said that while there were problems that occurred for some students purchasing tickets, the current system for purchasing concert tickets is the best one.
“I’d like students to understand [that] while there are problems with the website, the vast majority of people had a smooth process with it, at least to my understanding,” he said. “While it [does] falter, we’ve looked into it a lot, and it is the best system available for a college sale.”
High demand is not uncommon for CCC shows. In the past, many shows have sold out within a few hours. Swedish D.J. Avicii’s show — whose Homecoming performance last year sold out 35 minutes after the tickets went to sale — is CCC’s fastest selling show.
An additional 1,000 Ke$ha tickets went on sale Thursday to the general public for $33 — $8 more than the student price.
A limited number of student tickets may also become available sometime next week, according to a post CCC published on Facebook.
Schwartz said he heard many people around campus expressing excitement for Ke$ha.
He added that the show has generated “a lot of buzz.”
“I think that the fact that Ke$ha is playing is generating a lot of excitement, as we hoped it would,” he said, adding that some students see it as one of the “main events of the semester.”
Original Author: Tyler Alicea