Etixnow pre-emptively crashes ahead of Harvest single show sales, Ticketmaster steps in

Fredericton — This past week passes for the 2019 edition of the Harvest Jazz and Blues Festival went on sale. With top billing names like Jason Isbell, Nathaniel Rateliff, Lucinda Williams and Robert Plant, this lineup is your drunk uncle’s wet dream. It is no surprise all passes were gone in record time.

Also to no one’s surprise, longtime ticket vendor etixnow had major issues handling the volume Thursday morning. The Harvest Facebook page has been flooded with hundreds of complaints, and frankly, even my father wouldn’t shut up about it at breakfast this morning.

Complaints ranged from timed-out pages, to getting kicked out of the queue, to spinning wheels of death. It is obvious all this excitement is just too much for the poor vendor.

Ahead of the coming week’s single show ticket sales on April 26, etix has decided to just give up and crash now to avoid letting everyone down. The pressure is too much and the platform just can’t handle it.

Worry not, though! Ticket vendor giant Ticketmaster has stepped in to save the day. With a fully functional platform made to handle large volume, we can all expect things to run smoothly Friday. Unfortunately, the well-known downside to having Ticketmaster as your ticket overlord is that 90 per cent of tickets go to scalper bots to automatically get sold on resale sites like Stubhub and Kijiji. If you actually want to go to these shows, expect to pay a markup of 200 per cent. But hey, that’s a fair price to pay for a fully functional website.

Don’t like the sounds of that? Have some of those purple tokens to use up from three years ago? We highly recommend spending your Harvest week hanging out in the Moose Light beer garden and playing few rounds of Harvest Bingo.