STEWART COPELAND

Would I have a better chance to get good seats if I camped out infront of the ticket office (old school!), then if I got online at ticketmaster.com as soon as they were released?

Tickets sell out so fast, I don't think the camping out thing works at all anymore, in my experience. I've heard too many stories of people being like 5th or 6th in line and a show is "sold out" by the time they're at the window. Internet is usually the best bet.

You could always try having one friend on the phone, one on the computer and one at the venue and/or retail outlet.

Or several friends on the Stewart Copeland website working together to get a few seats for each of several shows.

This would really work, especially if folks are willing to travel to wherever we can get the best tix. I guess it does depend on ticket price and whether someone can afford to float what could be a couple hundred dollars on a credit card till s/he can get paid back.

:( all what you say...about tickets....thinks me THE POLICE reunion concert will be an impossible mission to my hopes and efforts...perhaps at the end of 2007 I'll be crowned at the real "King of Pain" :cry:

I think also that trading tickets would be a good thing. It happened a lot with U2 fans during their last tour.

If you can get to the U.S., someone can get tix for you, Jose. Of that I am sure.

Maybe what we ought to do is this: Pick two or three cities (Chicago, Philly, LA for example, or second tier cities like Columbus and Omaha, if they play any of those...there'll be MUCH less competition there), and everyone work like crazy to get six or seven good tickets to those shows. Then we can see where we got the best tickets and go there. I'm sure we can sell any less-desirable seats on Ebay.

This may not work, for obvious reasons (we'd have to set up a cash kitty up front - although we could easily use Paypal for that; we'd have to coordinate who had already gotten which seats)...but once tickets go on sale, if people are having trouble getting them at all, it may well be worth a try.

Here's a good article published in an alternative weekly in '05 on the Ticketmaster phenomenon. Sorry I'm cutting and pasting so much, but the article gives a pretty good idea of just what we're up against:

[quote]The fans queuing in front of Tower Records on this sunny Sunday morning have yet to learn that they will not be getting tickets to the two U2 shows in San Jose April 9 and 10.

If you plotted them on a continuum of who is about to get screwed most in today's international ticket buy, these people would be at the far left end of the spectrum -- the complete rubes. A line of them began forming by 7 a.m. on Market Street in San Francisco's Castro District. Dozens of large, white, distinctly Irish-looking men coalesced out of the dawn. These were not the pierced Castro denizens in fitted jeans Tower Records clerk Elisa Horsman normally sees.

Horsman made sure to drink moderately the night before, rise early, and show up on time for the biggest ticket sale in the two years she has worked at Tower. People have been coming in for days asking about today's sale -- what tickets would cost, which seats are best -- and she arrives by 9:45 to prep the store for its 10:00 opening.

A fifty-foot-long line of thirtysomething males already snakes down the block. Dozens of would-be-concertgoers bounce in place, mumbling to one another and staring at the skinny, indie-rock-styled clerk in her early twenties. Horsman pounds on the door for her manager to let her in as she deflects the crowd's anxious questions.

"When are you going to open up?"

"Ten."

"When do the tickets go on sale?"

"Ten."

"You're not going to let us in early?"

"No."

Horsman can't recall when the line has ever been this unruly. All across the Bay Area, it's much the same. Area ticket clerks say the three most popular locations for buying tickets in person -- Oakland's Paramount Theatre, the Emeryville Tower Records, and its sister store here in the Castro -- all feature long, grumpy lines. People punch their cell phones, calling girlfriends and boyfriends at remote Ticketmaster centers in Richmond and Concord. Some friends travel as far away as Davis to beat the crowds.

"Have they opened the store yet?" one girl asks her friend on the phone. "I know, I know! Not here either! Not till ten!"

The crowd's anxiety increases as fans trade stories of the botched fan-club presale on the prior Tuesday. "Tuesday, Bloody Tuesday," people are calling it. Specially reserved seats for members of U2's Propaganda fan club blew out online in minutes. Two million hits a second flooded Ticketmaster's servers. Scalpers immediately sold fan-club tickets at triple their face value. Rumors suggest that scalpers bought hundreds of fan-club memberships under different names to resell the coveted general admission floor seats.

At 9:50 a.m. on Market Street, fifty pairs of eyes stare through tinted storefront glass at Horsman as she boots up the dedicated Ticketmaster computer. She is the Ticketmaster guru, in charge of training new clerks on a machine most employees simply fear. A mouseless computer with an arcane visual interface and tons of jargon, it takes at least four hours, plus follow-up training, to become proficient. So most of them just punt the job to Horsman.

"Things are already running slowly," she worries. With just minutes left until tickets go on sale, she cannot log on to Ticketmaster's main computers.

Horsman knows this is the most hotly anticipated concert of 2005. U2 tours maybe once every five years, and fans aren't sure how long the band will keep doing so. As far as the sickly American concert industry is concerned, U2 is the only remaining superband -- the only band that can sell out every massive stadium it intends to play moments after announcing its tour dates.

Shows like this aren't just popular with members of the fan club. They're pure gold for the scalpers, too, and the clerk notices a few regulars in line with their typical seating lists and charts. Older and less enthusiastic than other customers, and usually waiting alone, these patrons are all business.

The store manager unlocks the front door at 10:00 and the first fans shuffle toward Horsman. Ticketmaster limits floor seats to two tickets per order, at $150 per ticket. Upper-deck seats go for $50 apiece and can be bought in blocks of eight, she tells them. The customers ask for the floor, and after a system delay of a few minutes, Horsman can't believe what she pulls up.

Nothing. The entire floor is gone.

The fans ask for the upper deck, anything. Horsman hits the "tab" and "enter" buttons, trying to pull down whatever she can from the slow computer. Nothing happens.

She manages to lock in a pair of tickets behind the stage. These fans will have to look at Bono's ass for two hours. She tries once again to do better, but it's all she's getting.

The customers buy the crap tickets anyway, taking them as the next person walks up. It's ten minutes into the sale and Horsman has managed to serve only one customer.

Irishmen call her names in thick accents under their breath. Some people threaten her. She keeps her head down and focuses on the unresponsive computer as people in the angry crowd stomp their feet, look at their watches, call friends on cell phones, and bitch like burned addicts.

"I should've called in sick," she thinks.

Meanwhile, Michael Horne, also known as the Sledge, is at home in Oakland in his pajamas. He plays guitar in Northern California's most popular U2 tribute band, Zoostation.

The Sledge doesn't simply love U2. He makes money off the band as a successful knock-off brand. Business has picked up with the latest U2 album and forthcoming tour, and shows clutter his weekend calendar. In less than two months from today's ticket-line clusterfuck, Zoostation will headline this year's San Francisco St. Patrick's Day parade.

The Sledge has the good sense to know that waiting in line for tickets is for complete rubes. You're competing against scalpers and fans at 3,300 other Ticketmaster locations, not to mention thousands more calling in on Ticketmaster's nineteen international phone lines.[/quote]

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/issues/20 ... ature.html

Hmmmm...OK, REALLY sorry for the long quote, but the article cuts to the chase on the last page:

[quote]How to Buy Scarce Tickets

Seven tips to help you beat the scalpers.

Scoring good seats to the November 8 and 9 U2 shows just scheduled for the Oakland Arena no longer requires long, cold nights camped out in front of some record store or venue. Nowadays, the sleepover tactic can prove downright stupid. Real fans plan ahead. And they use technology to their advantage. A few tips:

1. Register with the fan club. Some big bands want true fans to get first crack at tickets, and will offer presales to registered members of their fan clubs. At a cost of around $20, registered U2 fans got a special password granting access to a secret corner of Ticketmaster.com almost a week prior to the general sale. The catch: fans weren't the only ones passionate enough to plunk down a few extra bucks for access. Scalpers bought multiple fan club memberships under different names and used the access to troll for pay dirt. The system jammed, and real fans fumed.

2. Plan your attack. Scalpers make money off the laziness of concertgoers, so know the ins and outs of the three main ticket-dispersal systems: online, phone, and in person. Bookmark the Ticketmaster.com page and familiarize yourself with its structure. You can even enter payment information ahead of time so the site can process your order in a speedy, seat-saving click. Put the hotline on speed dial. Know where tickets are going on sale, and at what time. Lastly, know your payment options. The buyer's name, shipping address, and billing address often have to match, or you'll be nose-bleeding it with the other rubes who paid double.

3. Take multiple routes. Even simple water molecules take the easiest route downhill, so why are you trying to muscle out a dozen jarheads in front of Tower Records in Emeryville? Get online at work with six of your buddies. Get those same six buddies on the phone to Ticketmaster. Recruit siblings and spouses to help with the total assault on the phone lines, modems, and ticket centers. Communicate via cell phone, and you have a dozen stabs compared to one. Swarm attacks put you in the 98th percentile of effective ticket buyers.

4. Get e-savvy. When the Web floodgates open at 10:00 a.m. on a ticket sale day, hundreds of thousands of fans and scalpers bum-rush the virtual door. The gatekeeper is a character recognition test designed to keep out automated ticket-buying programs. Problem is, everyone gets stuck in the bottleneck. Hit "refresh" in your browser when the word-test page lags. Enter the new word and hit "enter." When the page freezes again, repeat until you get through.

5. Travel to obscure locations. It's the fanboy's dream: The entire world is clamoring for Radiohead tickets, and you're in the basement of some suburban Nordstrom at the most underexposed ticket center in the Western Hemisphere. No lines, no hassle. There aren't that many secret spots anymore, but the experienced advise simply heading inland. Walnut Creek, Concord, Davis -- the farther you are from urban civilization, the fewer people have heard of the Walkmen or Amon Tobin, and the shorter the lines.

6. Seek out competent clerks. So you made it to your remote location, or you were the first in line at Tower Records in San Francisco. You'll still need a Ticketmaster MacGyver to negotiate your transaction amid hundreds of thousands of orders clogging the system. A lot of ticket centers have one guru who knows more than anyone else about scoring seats. Do your homework and make sure he or she is there, or be prepared for the loudspeaker announcement of, "Ummmm, can I get some help at the ticket desk?"

7. Ignore the lemmings. It sounds crazy, but maybe you should try to seek out less-hyped music. For every scalper-frenzied, sold-out superband concert with optional DVD, there are approximately a million unexpected, intimate encounters between fans and their creators. Get indie cred and help feed starving locals. Seek out bands asking $5 at the door. Even if you hate the music, the cost is still a thirtieth of the price of a $150 U2 seat. And you can use the rest to buy rounds for the poor and hungry that Bono is always crooning about.[/quote]

Good advice, and yeah, hopefully we can all help each other out with getting tickets based on our location, etc. I'm sure I'll be picking a show or two to try the Ticketmaster auction for the best seats, for example, and they always require you to bid on pairs of tickets where I may only need an odd number of tickets.)

Once the tour dates are announced, I'm sure we'll figure out a plan to coordinate things before tickets go on sale.

[quote="Divemistress of the Dark"]If you can get to the U.S., someone can get tix for you, Jose. Of that I am sure.
[/quote]

Great! But first I need to wont be rejected by USA embassy to get the visa... you know is hard from a citizen from third world for getting those stamp :(