Radiohead tickets went on sale yesterday for their LA and NY stops and buying tickets via ticketmaster proved to be a nightmare once again. For some insane reason everything must go onsale Saturdays at 10am, so obviously the millions of Radiohead and Janet Jackson fans were pounding the system the same time I went online. Why oh why can't they stagger the onsale times throughout the day? 

I filed this under Technology because Ticketmaster needs to improve theirs. Click read more to check out the rest of my story...

Being a good fan, I had already tried to buy tickets through W.A.S.T.E. but I wasn't selected for the lottery. Out of the dozen people that I know who signed up, only one person was selected. So I obviously wasn't alone. Strike One

On Thursday, MTV was holding another pre-sale for the Hollywood Bowl show and they were selling 1,000 tickets. Thursday at 10 am I was in front of my desk, credit card in hand, ready to go. I pull up the site at 9:55am and start reloading the page until I see it change. It asks me for a code from the MTV site, my mail option and that's it. I hit submit and it comes back with an error?!?! Something about how I didn't select the number of tickets!! I hit the back button and there isn't an option for number of tickets. So I refresh the page and the option shows up, I enter in the number of tickets, the secret code, the mail option, and off I go.

Sold Out. Strike Two

I'm not worried, there were hardly any W.A.S.T.E. tickets around and only a thousand presale tickets, the general sale will be much better which is a few days away.

Saturday morning 9:55AM, I'm in front of my sister's computer hitting refresh on two windows (this has to double my chances right?). 10:00AM rolls around and I punch in 2 tickets, standard mail and hit "Look For Tickets". Almost instantly I get a reply saying the "system it too busy". So I've got two windows with this busy screen and I'm switching back and forth between the two reloading them as I go.

Finally!!! I get through and have tickets!! I'm warned that I have five minutes to complete the transaction or else the tickets will be put back in the pool for others to grab. I quickly put in my first name, middle initial, last name, address, city, state, phone, email, credit card number, expiration date, type and hit submit. As the page is loading I'm thanking god that I can type with all five fingers. The page loads and I still don't have the tickets (that's to that five minute warning on the top of the screen), I still need to confirm the request. So I quickly scan the page and move my mouse over the Finish button.

Wait.

What about the other screen? It's sitting there doing nothing while it could be searching for another pair. I switch over, reload that page, then switch back and click Finish. This message comes up:

"We could not locate your tickets. This may be caused by exceeding the five minute time limit or by using two browser windows to search for tickets".

You gotta be shittin' me! You've got radio stations giving away a million tickets, record labels comp'ing everyone in town and I can't search with two browser windows?!?!?

I go back and reloaded the page, put in two tickets, standard mail, and tried to "Look For Tickets" but it was already sold out. Strike Three