The war between man versus machine rages on.
Garth Brooks continued with his unconventional rollout strategy for his Blame It All On My Roots Tour as tickets went on sale for the third of three upcoming shows at the Delta Center in Salt Lake City, Utah.
The “Friends in Low Places” singer has been announcing his tour stops one city at a time, only a few weeks before the shows, and adding additional dates after the original shows sell out. And he’s also priced all tickets in the arena the same, in an attempt to ensure an equal opportunity for all fans to get into the show while also hoping to limit bots from scooping up all the tickets and scalpers ripping off fans.
While it may be a little more inconvenient for fans, who have less notice of shows and less time to plan their travel, it seems like the strategy has been working pretty well for the most part. The demand is obviously there for Garth to sell out three and four shows in every city on the tour so far.
But you know what they say about the best laid plans, and it sounds like today Garth’s strategy to prevent bots from snatching up tickets hit a snag that resulted in ticket sales being shut down.
Tickets for the originally-announced shows on Friday, October 9 and Saturday, October 10 went on sale last Friday, with over 50,000 people entering the queue for each night. While ticketing platform SeatGeek says that over 90% of those in the queue were verified as human, shortly after sales opened for fans the system indicated that all tickets had been claimed – something that would have been impossible given the timeframe if it were only real fans.
Well the issues were addressed, but Garth ended up adding another show on Sunday, October 11 in an attempt to help out fans who had issues during the sale. At the time, he praised SeatGeek for catching and fixing the problem:
“The whole goal of an on sale is to make sure anyone who wants a ticket gets one. I am so fortunate that anyone wants to come to the show. The great state of Utah has ALWAYS been the place for Garth Brooks to play. This just shows me how blessed I continue to be when I am around those people.
Again, all my gratitude for the people at SeatGeek and the Delta Center. They handled the situation extremely well. I look forward to not only playing the two shows that sold today, but would love to get the chance to play more shows in Salt Lake.”
Well the newly-announced Sunday show went on sale today, but it seems like the bots once again reared their ugly head, to the point that this time the ticket sales were shut down entirely.
While it’s not clear how many tickets actually made it into the hands of actual fans during the time the sale was open, Garth’s team announced that all tickets purchased during the sale would be honored for the Sunday show:
“Hats off to those who stayed in and weathered the storm for tickets. It’s important you know the tickets you have bought are valid, and the Sunday show will be played. It will be my goal to make it the best show of the tour, so far.”
He also announced that a fourth show has been added to the Salt Lake City stop, which will now kick off on Thursday, October 8. Tickets for the new opening night will go on sale tomorrow, September 23 at 10 AM Mountain Time.
And Garth also added a plea to lawmakers to take action to combat the ongoing issue:
“If the powers that be are not going to make scalping illegal, can you please make bot activity during on sales illegal? It’s just not fair for the REAL person.”
Amen, G. Keep fighting the good fight.
