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April 04, 2006

Austin City Limits Festival Pre-sale Encounters Technical Malfunctions

Life's not fair. But you'd think after running an award-winning festival (or 2) for a few years running, the Austin City Limits Festival promoters would be able to handle server loads during their annual $35 limited pre-sale event to newsletter subscribers. I realize that the pre-sale is a crapshoot and that we should be grateful that the promoters allow people to buy some 3-day passes at such a affordable rate (and that the festival has been a sweaty torture chamber for the past two years due to unseasonably hot Indian summers here in Austin). However, it's piss poor performance for such an esteemed festival to have failed to email their entire list at once. Whatever the case, I finally received my announcement email at 10:36 p.m. (and others had similar experiences). I probably won't boycott the festival like Derek, but I'm feeling a little sour grapes about it right now.

As a big-time operation, it's time to invest some money into a ticket service provider that has scalability. As for me, I may be investing my $35 elsewhere this year.

Update: I was contacted by an ACL site coordinator about the issue.

Posted by timothompson at April 4, 2006 12:11 PM