Less than five minutes after ticket sales began for comedian Demetri Martin’s Feb. 26 performance, the Norris Box Office Web site announced that tickets were sold out.
“There’s a couple of things that we’re looking into as far as the official time that all tickets were officially unavailable, but the sold-out message started going up around four or five minutes after the tickets were sold,” said Weinberg sophomore Barry McCardel, the A&O Productions Promotions and Public Relations co-chair. “Some students maybe refreshed their browser because they thought that it was lagging or something, so they had tickets in their shopping cart that got held for 20 minutes.”
McCardel added that those tickets returned to circulation after 20 minutes, but when spoken to at 11:20 a.m., McCardel confirmed that all tickets were sold out.
Demetri Martin’s performance marked the first time that tickets for a large on-campus event were sold exclusively online. Tickets went on sale at 10:30 a.m. on Monday on the Norris Box Office Web site.
“There was a huge demand,” McCardel said. “That was truly a record-paced sell-out, but that by no means is that something that we’re excited about. Of course we’re happy when we put on a popular event, but it’s always much more disappointing when there’s students that can’t get tickets.”
After seeing the enthusiasm surrounding the announcement for Demetri Martin’s performance, A&O decided to lower the number of tickets that could be purchased by NetID.
“We booked an incredibly popular show and it’s important to know that we made the proactive decision of decreasing the ticket count to two from three to avoid an even worse situation.” McCardel said. “We felt that two was the best possible number.”
For McCardel, the fast sell-out of some A&O events has to do with the lack of large venues on campus to accommodate all the students who would want to attend.
“It would be hard for anyone to anticipate it going out in five minutes, but we did anticipate that this was going to go fast,” he added. “We just don’t have a venue big enough for some of these shows.”