being prepared to buy tickets
Got my seattle tickets. Happy like Sunday morning hungover after your best friend’s wedding happy. Mellow wellbeing, rather than euphoric. This year I may yet fulfil my thrice thwarted mission to see Pearl Jam in the Northwest Americas. Will be catching them a few weeks before on this side of the pond too, although this is now seeming almost pedestrian by comparison!
This post is intended to be a helpful summary of the accumulated learning about how to maximise the chances of clinching a deal on tickets. I am genuinely sympathetic to those locked out tonight. I’ve been there! Good luck with ticketmaster - I reckon the early birds will still get some juicy worms there. My experience is that with a bit of persistence and determination, tickets can be secured one way or another, even if you failed via ten club.
For me this year was easily the smoothest I’ve ever got tickets from the ten club online for one of the more ‘competitive’ shows. I've bought online since they started that. I think today's smoothness was due to a) ten club having their shit together, and b) me having my shit together.
The first time both have ever coincided! Normally when I’ve eventually been lucky I’ve had to lie down in a darkened room for two days to recover. I’ve learned some lessons over the past years though, which I wasn’t planning to lose sight of today.
Now I know today different people had different problems and I sympathise, but this post is largely aimed at those who are looking at getting tickets over the coming weeks. It’s just a reminder of the basics I have learned over previous stressful sales. It’s mostly aimed at the novice (with a few extras), so if you’re experienced and you got shut out, I’m sorry, maybe I was just lucky today.
However, for those looking to buy over the coming period; I believe If you have an active broadband connection, correct (in date) credit card details, money in your card account and are sitting at your computer 10 minutes before the ten club have stated the tickets will be on sale, then I think you should have every chance of securing tickets for the shows you want following these methods.
Those people who can be bothered to read this and follow these points should have an edge on future ticket sales. Those that don’t read or follow, I won’t worry about – those are your competition!
These are my recommendations. They aren’t gospel truth, I only know what I know.
a) use firefox. If you don’t know it, familiarise yourself. It just seems quicker, more intuitive, easier to go between different tabs, reliable and can auto-complete your details pretty well (although I didn’t really need that this year). Overall it’s much easier to jump around in and use with different windows open.
b) update your profile. Make sure in the goods section of ten club site you have already entered the billing and address details of the credit card you will be using in your profile (registered and accurate in advance). This year I used my mother’s credit card (thanks Mum!), but I planned ahead and made sure her billing details were already entered as an additional address on my profile. It’s easy enough to flick between the primary and secondary address you’ve registered when ‘checking out’ in a panic at the time, but I wouldn’t have wanted to have to enter the addresses all from scratch in the panic. Everyone with eyes should be able to check if their registered address is the same as the credit card they will be using in preparation.
c) be accurate rather than panicky. If you refresh at the right time to find the new tickets displayed quickly, pretty soon after they are first put on, (see more below), and can update your cart &checkout, then I believe once they are in your cart they are not going to disappear for the moment and If you’re ahead of the pack the site is not nearly so likely to throw you out. For this reason, this is your best shot, you don’t want to fuck this bit up and when you try again there are no tickets.
In the past I have got here, panicked and entered the wrong credit card details (you have to enter them ‘live’). Back to square one. This time I typed them in from scratch but I did it carefully and double checked they were correct. If they are right then you press send and the site doesn’t crash, then you have your tickets.
This time, following these methods I was bang on the money each time. In past years I’ve fucked up, and then the wave of competition catches up, the server freezes, you can get chucked out etc. If you can calmly get the tickets into your cart at 10amPDT (check actual stated time), enter the correct number and checkout I think you have a good chance of success, if the ten club website holds up (which it did perfectly for me today).
c2) timezone – make sure you are at your computer at the correct time for your location. Check here to compare: http://wwp.greenwichmeantime.com/ make sure you factor in your own summer time / daylight saving, since today I was GMT +1 due to British Summer Time. You shouldn’t need to ask whether your country is in daylight saving on the pearl jam message board – there other ways of finding this information! These facts are unconnected to pearl jam and it will help your confidence to know you have calculated exactly when YOU need to be at your pc.
d) In case of initial failure – not this year, but in previous years I have learned that you have to get straight back in the fray, keep refreshing, don’t worry about ‘temporarily out of stock’, try again, and sometimes if you click and it fails at the end, check your ‘orders’ – you may well have clinched it just as it crashed and not realised. if you really want tickets, don’t give up until it says on the tickets page (‘tickets sold out’). If you give up at this stage there are others who will gladly pick the extras up.
The 'temporarily out of stock' probably relates to people having tickets in their cart and not buying them. However, for all I know it might also be tenclub people ringing PJ management and saying – ok we sold x tickets in x minutes, the demand is therefore x, can we negotiate some more fanclub tickets? I’m speculating, but just in my own profession this is the kind of decisions that organisations have to take behind the scenes. Regardless, it doesn’t matter to us. All you need to know is the only time to stop trying is when tenclub labels them as ‘sold out’ on the shopping page. This is the lights coming up at the end of a Springsteen concert. You are damned foolish if you leave before this point, but when the lights come up, you probably have to read the signs and go home!
d) confirmation. I believe, & this has been 100% accurate for me since the online ticket system began and confirmed by other posters here, that once the new Order ID number appears in your ‘orders’ section on your goods profile, then your tickets are 100% safe, your money has gone through, the order is approved, you are home and dry. Relax. Get off the server! If you really doubt this and are desperate, you could ‘try’ buying another ticket - You should be automatically barred this time. Anyway, check your email at this point. This year I had a tenclub confirmation almost instantly (thanks tenclub!)
e) advanced techniques. Ok, you’ve read this far. I’ll tell you one thing I did this year which might have given me an edge. I couldn’t have done this even in 2007 cos I wasn’t so tech savvy. Success hinges on getting the tickets in your cart and then processed as soon as possible once they are displayed online right?. Failure comes from tickets either being unavailable, or you being thrown out of the system during the process. According to the laws of probability I believe every second that passes after the tickets are first displayed means more and more competition, more strain on the server, and more chance of getting bounced out as the wave of people who can see the tickets and are putting them in their cart increases. I think if you get tickets in your cart and are on your way right at the outset, you get ahead of the wave where every second hundreds of new people are clicking through, then you can sail through very quickly, as I did today. I’ve been plain sailing ahead like this in previous years too, but then fucked up on some of the basics (spelt out above).
So really this hinges on seeing the tickets at the earliest possible moment. For this you need to be sitting at the computer at the appointed time and refreshing your page every time the tickets are not shown (if you’re not doing this you’re not even in the race. You just need to be 5-10 minutes early and start clicking).
The thing I noticed immediately before the sale began today though was that the link that ten club gave out just leads to the ‘general’ sales page. If you click on ‘tickets’, and there are none and then ‘refresh’ this page, you are just going back to the general entrance. This is not the page you want to be refreshing, this page is the front door whereas the tickets are displayed in a side room. it is also the page which everyone else is probably refreshing so it is also the one that is generally freezing most and slowest.
e2) The page you want to be refreshing is actually the ‘tickets’ one that leads off the official entrance. I could post the actual link but it might change, and it might get me slapped on the wrists by mods (don’t know). What I did, which is fairly low level internet savviness is to right-click on that ‘tickets’ link, select ‘copy link location’, open a new tab in firefox, ‘paste’ into the address bar and solely refresh THIS page. I kept the original one in another tab just to double check. Refresh this new page regularly and you will have a clean run at it. I may be wrong but it seemed quicker this way than clicking 'tickets' repeatedly on the main page.
Anyway guys. I’m glad I was lucky. I think if you follow everything I said here, and sit at your computer refreshing the right page 5-10 minutes before the allotted time then you will only fail if the ten club servers fuck up terribly.
That’s all. Please don’t hate me if you didn’t get tickets through no fault of your own, put your efforts into succeeding with Ticketmaster, I’m just trying to pull together in one place all I’ve learned these past years about these feeding frenzies. Today's was one of the most civilised in memory! I believe the reason I am happy this evening is 50% luck and 50% judgement. These were the judgements. I can’t help you with the luck!!
peace
tremors
This post is intended to be a helpful summary of the accumulated learning about how to maximise the chances of clinching a deal on tickets. I am genuinely sympathetic to those locked out tonight. I’ve been there! Good luck with ticketmaster - I reckon the early birds will still get some juicy worms there. My experience is that with a bit of persistence and determination, tickets can be secured one way or another, even if you failed via ten club.
For me this year was easily the smoothest I’ve ever got tickets from the ten club online for one of the more ‘competitive’ shows. I've bought online since they started that. I think today's smoothness was due to a) ten club having their shit together, and b) me having my shit together.
The first time both have ever coincided! Normally when I’ve eventually been lucky I’ve had to lie down in a darkened room for two days to recover. I’ve learned some lessons over the past years though, which I wasn’t planning to lose sight of today.
Now I know today different people had different problems and I sympathise, but this post is largely aimed at those who are looking at getting tickets over the coming weeks. It’s just a reminder of the basics I have learned over previous stressful sales. It’s mostly aimed at the novice (with a few extras), so if you’re experienced and you got shut out, I’m sorry, maybe I was just lucky today.
However, for those looking to buy over the coming period; I believe If you have an active broadband connection, correct (in date) credit card details, money in your card account and are sitting at your computer 10 minutes before the ten club have stated the tickets will be on sale, then I think you should have every chance of securing tickets for the shows you want following these methods.
Those people who can be bothered to read this and follow these points should have an edge on future ticket sales. Those that don’t read or follow, I won’t worry about – those are your competition!
These are my recommendations. They aren’t gospel truth, I only know what I know.
a) use firefox. If you don’t know it, familiarise yourself. It just seems quicker, more intuitive, easier to go between different tabs, reliable and can auto-complete your details pretty well (although I didn’t really need that this year). Overall it’s much easier to jump around in and use with different windows open.
b) update your profile. Make sure in the goods section of ten club site you have already entered the billing and address details of the credit card you will be using in your profile (registered and accurate in advance). This year I used my mother’s credit card (thanks Mum!), but I planned ahead and made sure her billing details were already entered as an additional address on my profile. It’s easy enough to flick between the primary and secondary address you’ve registered when ‘checking out’ in a panic at the time, but I wouldn’t have wanted to have to enter the addresses all from scratch in the panic. Everyone with eyes should be able to check if their registered address is the same as the credit card they will be using in preparation.
c) be accurate rather than panicky. If you refresh at the right time to find the new tickets displayed quickly, pretty soon after they are first put on, (see more below), and can update your cart &checkout, then I believe once they are in your cart they are not going to disappear for the moment and If you’re ahead of the pack the site is not nearly so likely to throw you out. For this reason, this is your best shot, you don’t want to fuck this bit up and when you try again there are no tickets.
In the past I have got here, panicked and entered the wrong credit card details (you have to enter them ‘live’). Back to square one. This time I typed them in from scratch but I did it carefully and double checked they were correct. If they are right then you press send and the site doesn’t crash, then you have your tickets.
This time, following these methods I was bang on the money each time. In past years I’ve fucked up, and then the wave of competition catches up, the server freezes, you can get chucked out etc. If you can calmly get the tickets into your cart at 10amPDT (check actual stated time), enter the correct number and checkout I think you have a good chance of success, if the ten club website holds up (which it did perfectly for me today).
c2) timezone – make sure you are at your computer at the correct time for your location. Check here to compare: http://wwp.greenwichmeantime.com/ make sure you factor in your own summer time / daylight saving, since today I was GMT +1 due to British Summer Time. You shouldn’t need to ask whether your country is in daylight saving on the pearl jam message board – there other ways of finding this information! These facts are unconnected to pearl jam and it will help your confidence to know you have calculated exactly when YOU need to be at your pc.
d) In case of initial failure – not this year, but in previous years I have learned that you have to get straight back in the fray, keep refreshing, don’t worry about ‘temporarily out of stock’, try again, and sometimes if you click and it fails at the end, check your ‘orders’ – you may well have clinched it just as it crashed and not realised. if you really want tickets, don’t give up until it says on the tickets page (‘tickets sold out’). If you give up at this stage there are others who will gladly pick the extras up.
The 'temporarily out of stock' probably relates to people having tickets in their cart and not buying them. However, for all I know it might also be tenclub people ringing PJ management and saying – ok we sold x tickets in x minutes, the demand is therefore x, can we negotiate some more fanclub tickets? I’m speculating, but just in my own profession this is the kind of decisions that organisations have to take behind the scenes. Regardless, it doesn’t matter to us. All you need to know is the only time to stop trying is when tenclub labels them as ‘sold out’ on the shopping page. This is the lights coming up at the end of a Springsteen concert. You are damned foolish if you leave before this point, but when the lights come up, you probably have to read the signs and go home!
d) confirmation. I believe, & this has been 100% accurate for me since the online ticket system began and confirmed by other posters here, that once the new Order ID number appears in your ‘orders’ section on your goods profile, then your tickets are 100% safe, your money has gone through, the order is approved, you are home and dry. Relax. Get off the server! If you really doubt this and are desperate, you could ‘try’ buying another ticket - You should be automatically barred this time. Anyway, check your email at this point. This year I had a tenclub confirmation almost instantly (thanks tenclub!)
e) advanced techniques. Ok, you’ve read this far. I’ll tell you one thing I did this year which might have given me an edge. I couldn’t have done this even in 2007 cos I wasn’t so tech savvy. Success hinges on getting the tickets in your cart and then processed as soon as possible once they are displayed online right?. Failure comes from tickets either being unavailable, or you being thrown out of the system during the process. According to the laws of probability I believe every second that passes after the tickets are first displayed means more and more competition, more strain on the server, and more chance of getting bounced out as the wave of people who can see the tickets and are putting them in their cart increases. I think if you get tickets in your cart and are on your way right at the outset, you get ahead of the wave where every second hundreds of new people are clicking through, then you can sail through very quickly, as I did today. I’ve been plain sailing ahead like this in previous years too, but then fucked up on some of the basics (spelt out above).
So really this hinges on seeing the tickets at the earliest possible moment. For this you need to be sitting at the computer at the appointed time and refreshing your page every time the tickets are not shown (if you’re not doing this you’re not even in the race. You just need to be 5-10 minutes early and start clicking).
The thing I noticed immediately before the sale began today though was that the link that ten club gave out just leads to the ‘general’ sales page. If you click on ‘tickets’, and there are none and then ‘refresh’ this page, you are just going back to the general entrance. This is not the page you want to be refreshing, this page is the front door whereas the tickets are displayed in a side room. it is also the page which everyone else is probably refreshing so it is also the one that is generally freezing most and slowest.
e2) The page you want to be refreshing is actually the ‘tickets’ one that leads off the official entrance. I could post the actual link but it might change, and it might get me slapped on the wrists by mods (don’t know). What I did, which is fairly low level internet savviness is to right-click on that ‘tickets’ link, select ‘copy link location’, open a new tab in firefox, ‘paste’ into the address bar and solely refresh THIS page. I kept the original one in another tab just to double check. Refresh this new page regularly and you will have a clean run at it. I may be wrong but it seemed quicker this way than clicking 'tickets' repeatedly on the main page.
Anyway guys. I’m glad I was lucky. I think if you follow everything I said here, and sit at your computer refreshing the right page 5-10 minutes before the allotted time then you will only fail if the ten club servers fuck up terribly.
That’s all. Please don’t hate me if you didn’t get tickets through no fault of your own, put your efforts into succeeding with Ticketmaster, I’m just trying to pull together in one place all I’ve learned these past years about these feeding frenzies. Today's was one of the most civilised in memory! I believe the reason I am happy this evening is 50% luck and 50% judgement. These were the judgements. I can’t help you with the luck!!
peace
tremors
Cancel my subscription to the Ressurection
Send my credentials to the house of detention
Send my credentials to the house of detention
Post edited by Unknown User on
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Comments
Pearl Jam bootlegs:
http://wegotshit.blogspot.com
Sounds a bit like a riddle your one! If you want to share then go ahead, but I'm not seeking the answer right now - I'm needing sleep!
Send my credentials to the house of detention
Is it F5, F5, F5, F5, F5, F5??
after writing that book of a post, you must be tired.
A clue:
Utilzing the tactic will gain you anywhere from 5 to 15 seconds on the people not utilzing it at the most opportune time imaginable
Pearl Jam bootlegs:
http://wegotshit.blogspot.com
Is it listening to rearviewmirror to get in the go-time mood? I saw that suggested on here and it works for me, in fact that song is my go-time music for everything.
Melissa
1996: Ft Lauderdale
1998: Birmingham
2000: Charlotte, Tampa
2003: Tampa, Atlanta, Phoenix
2004: Kissimmee
2008: West Palm Beach, Bonnaroo, Columbia
2010: MSG2
2012: Music Midtown
2014: Memphis
2018: Wrigley 1, Fenway 1
2022: Nashville
2023: Ft. Worth II
2024: Baltimore
Upcoming: 2025 Hollywood, FL Night 2
world fucking champs!!!
Not trying to be mean, just saying.
Thanks for the effort though!
“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.” - Albert Camus
If you get it right away, that's the best. But it's a little bit of luck to do that.
Melissa
"Holy long ass fucking posts Bat-man!" Robin
"yes boy wonder....he may be hitting what is referred to as "the pipe"...." Bat-man
1) Make sure your contact info up to date
2) Log in 15 minutes early
3) Bookmark the tickets page (the main web page was having issues, but the goods page was fine, goods page must be on a better server
4) Type your CC number into notepad and copy it, so you can paste it in the credit card form.
5) Refresh, Refresh, Refresh
I think thats all you really need?
I agree with all of this with a slight tweak to the 5th: #1 tip I would say is to just click the "Tickets" link in Goods instead of refreshing the entire page. Clicking the link refreshes what's in the tickets category each time and it takes much less time to load than refreshing all of goods.
Also, I don't think putting CC info in quickly matters since once they're in your cart they're yours for a bit... although I do that anyway just in case
I questioned that part also. I have been under that impression.
I used to say this back on the old Pit! So hopefully, I'm the one you got it from. It really does work for whatever psychological reason. Just put it on loop, and I'm set. Everything feels 2x faster. Haven't missed a sale while listening to it.
3 Decibels Doubles the Volume
2006