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Home > Austin Music Source > Archives > 2009 > October > 13 > Entry
Well, that was quick: Early Bird ACL tickets sell out inside of a day
So, those $50 tickets vanished on Oct. 9. Now, the $145 tickets which went on sale at roughly 10 a.m. today (Oct. 13) were sold in a matter of hours. This is the first time the early bird tickets have sold out inside a day.
So what have we learned?
A whole bunch of people don’t care about the possibility of rain, or the rain that fell this year. (C3 doesn’t say how many were on sale.)
The same number of people don’t care about what’s in Dillo Dirt if Pearl Jam (or the ACL 2010 version) is playing in front of them.
This has created a bit of a fuss, as did a rumor that TicketCity had purchased 7,000 tickets.
Secondary resellers such as TicketCity often have pages up for shows such as this all year. Everyone seems to be noticing it today because early bird tickets sold out so fast.
By the count on this webpage, an Austin-based ticket reseller, is selling 97 ACL tickets and wristbands.
This does not necessarily mean they have immediate access to 97 tickets. For example, they are offering wristbands for sale. Wristbands are obviously not yet available.
“I don’t think we have any in hand,” TicketCity president Randy Cohen said Monday. “When we get them shipped to us from C3, we send them to you. We get them the same way you do.”
So there’s no particular reason to think they have, say, 20 three-day passes at $245 and 20 three-day passes at $254 right this second.
ACL has a four-tickets-per-person limit. Even if a reseller employed 20 temps to buy 4 tickets each, that’s only 80 tickets.
Which there’s no reason to think they have.
So rumors of secondary ticket brokers buying the majority of the early bird tickets seems extremely unlikely.
Secondary ticket brokers are essentially selling you the guarantee that they will provide you, come heck or high water, a ticket to event X by the time event X comes around.
Now, is it possible that some people who bought early bird tickets today will eventually put them on CraigsList? Yes.
Is it possible that secondary ticket brokers will buy those tickets and resell them at a markup? Yes.
Will secondary ticket brokers try to buy tickets when the next round goes on sale? Yes.
Also, it seems very likely that C3 would have put more early bird tickets on sale if they had known there would be this much demand. They have no reason not to. The difference between the early bird price and the eventual list price isn’t so great that C3 wouldn’t want to have the cash on hand today.
It’s very likely they were as surprised as anyone else these tickets sold out so fast.
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