The North American Tour & Presale for members

USA and Canada (April 1 - June 4, 2009). Special concert for fans in NYC (February 19). Concert reports, set lists, photos, media coverage, multimedia links, recollections...
saavynewyorker
Posts: 2
Joined: Wed Feb 18, 2009 8:29 pm

Re: The North American Tour & Presale for members

Post by saavynewyorker »

This is disgusting American Express presale in New York for Gold Card Members was sold out at 10 AM I logged on at 10 AM and no tickets at any price. What can we do to ticketmaster? This is fraud big time.
Walsh75
Posts: 102
Joined: Fri Feb 20, 2009 10:54 am

Re: The North American Tour & Presale for members

Post by Walsh75 »

Well, here's a final update on this mess. LOL. Guess I can look at it as good news and bad news for myself.

Got on Ticketmaster.com right at 10am here for the general release sale in Detroit. Hoped for $250. They really do seem to be all sold out. Wouldn't give me anything!

But I did end up getting a ticket and spending FAR LESS money for once than I planned. So I will be going and that's all that counts.

I'm just puzzled at that $250 deal. Did they REALLY go that quick during the first pre-sale?
asleepanddreaming
Posts: 2
Joined: Wed Feb 25, 2009 7:22 pm

Re: The North American Tour & Presale for members

Post by asleepanddreaming »

Regarding the $250 tickets: for Hamilton at least it appears that those were the first three rows of the floor only. That's really not a lot of seats. Since those are split up between different pre-sales and the public sale, it's no surprise they are difficult to snag.

I feel lousy for everyone who tried hard and did not get the tickets they wanted. But there is a sense of entitlement here that is also disappointing. The fact is that this may be the last tour for Mr. Cohen, all reports are that he is playing for more than 2 hours and even in the stupid arenas I believe these will be shows to remember. So don't miss out just because you are not sitting in the front row!

Again, I salute the Cohen team for trying to assure more seats are available to people who are actually going to use, not scalpers. I wish I could afford to attend more!
blue_94_trooper
Posts: 48
Joined: Wed Feb 25, 2009 9:50 pm

Re: The North American Tour & Presale for members

Post by blue_94_trooper »

saavynewyorker wrote:This is disgusting American Express presale in New York for Gold Card Members was sold out at 10 AM I logged on at 10 AM and no tickets at any price. What can we do to ticketmaster? This is fraud big time.
Where's the fraud? Were you guaranteed tickets? There is a limited number of tickets for each presale. The number of people trying to get those tickets is WAY more than the number of tickets available. I bet there were only a few hundred on this presale. Try again with the fan club presale and with the general sale and remember the 6,000 seats at Radio City probably covers 20% or less of the number of people who are trying to get to that show.

btw - when you say 10 a.m., what clock did you use? When I'm going for ticket sales I always synchronize my watch to time.gov. Ticketmaster typically runs almost 10 seconds behind that. You should be logged in, with a credit card saved on your account, and on the sale page hitting refresh at about 10:00:05. Don't hit it too many times (~8 in rapid succession) or TM will lock you out.

Don't waste time thinking about sections and pray that you get a "secret word" that you can read on the first shot.
Walsh75
Posts: 102
Joined: Fri Feb 20, 2009 10:54 am

Re: The North American Tour & Presale for members

Post by Walsh75 »

Yeah one of my security words was "cheeseborough" along with another word. Longest and oddest word I've seen using TM.com.. Thankfully I got it right the first time.
blue_94_trooper
Posts: 48
Joined: Wed Feb 25, 2009 9:50 pm

Re: The North American Tour & Presale for members

Post by blue_94_trooper »

Walsh75 wrote:Yeah one of my security words was "cheeseborough" along with another word. Longest and oddest word I've seen using TM.com.. Thankfully I got it right the first time.
Web Security Words Help Digitize Old Books
by Nell Greenfieldboyce

All Things Considered, August 14, 2008 · People who use the Internet to talk to friends, set up free e-mail accounts or buy concert tickets are often unknowingly helping to digitize vast libraries of old books and newspapers.

That's because more than 40,000 Web sites — including popular ones such as Ticketmaster, Facebook and Craigslist — are using a new kind of security program called reCAPTCHA.

It's the brainchild of Luis von Ahn, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who helped develop another commonly used Web security system. That one, called CAPTCHA, will allow people to access a Web site only if they prove they are human — and not a spammer's computer — by typing in a sequence of letters or numbers that appear on the screen in a distorted or garbled image.

"Each time you type one of these, your brain is doing something amazing," von Ahn says. "Your brain is performing a task that, despite 50 years of research in computer science, we cannot yet get computers to do."

The trouble is, each time you type in one of these garbled words, you're also wasting time. Von Ahn recently realized exactly how much time was being wasted, and he found it demoralizing.

"Approximately 200 million of these are typed every day by people around the world. Each time you type one of these, essentially you waste about 10 seconds of your time," he says. "If you multiply that by 200 million, you get that humanity as a whole is wasting around 500,000 hours every day, typing these annoying squiggly characters."

But with reCAPTCHA, von Ahn has come up with an idea for harnessing all that human brain power.

He knew that lots of libraries have huge efforts under way to digitize their collections. These projects first scan books or newspapers by basically taking a picture of each page. Then a computer takes the image of each word and converts it into text, using optical character-recognition software.

But computers often come across printed words they just can't recognize. "Especially for older documents, things that were written before 1900, where the ink has faded and the pages have yellowed out, the computer makes a lot of mistakes," says von Ahn.

A human being has to look at those words and decipher them. It occurred to von Ahn that he could link this kind of activity to security devices used on the Internet. Instead of asking people to prove they're human by copying random sequences of distorted letters and numbers, he could ask them to decipher mystery words from scanned books and newspapers.

So he got together with The New York Times, which is digitizing newspapers going back to 1851, and a nonprofit called the Internet Archive, which is digitizing thousands of books.

And now, if you go to someplace like Ticketmaster to buy, say, Jimmy Buffett tickets, you'll be shown images of not one but two distorted words.

One of these is the real security word: Type this one correctly and you're in. The other image is something that has mystified the digitizing software.

If people recognize that word, they type it in. This image will actually be shown to several people. If they all agree on what the word is, it will be considered accurately transcribed. And von Ahn says it will be incorporated into the digitized copy of the book or the newspaper that it came from.

"And the number of words that we've been able to digitize like this is insanely large, it's like over a billion. It's like 1.3 billion by now," von Ahn says.

In the journal Science, he and his colleagues report that over the last year Web users have transcribed enough text to fill up more than 17,600 books, with better than 99 percent accuracy.

Marc Frons, chief technology officer of digital operations for The Times, says the pace is astonishing. Each month, the project digitizes about two years' worth of newspapers

"Next year, if all goes well, we can do as many as 70 years, which would be almost the entire rest of the archive that is not digitized," says Frons. "It's just pretty cool when you're signing up for a Web site and you see the reCAPTCHA sign. You sort of know, 'Gee, I'm helping digitize part of The New York Times.' "

People might wonder if this new system is wasting even more of their time than the traditional CAPTCHA setup, since it requires them to type in two different things instead of just one. But von Ahn says it's actually faster to type English words than to type random letters and numbers.

There is one problem. Sometimes, the book scanners offer up something that people can't read at all. "Like, for example, some sort of ink blot on the page," says von Ahn. "We might think it's a word and we present it, and you know, it says, 'Type the two words,' and sometimes one of the things is a word and one of the things is just a blob there. So sometimes people can be annoyed."

And here's another thing: "When you pull two random words from books, you can get some very random combinations," says Brian Pike, chief technology officer for Ticketmaster.

The two words can occasionally form juxtapositions that could be weird or offensive. "And there's certain phrases and words we've asked them to make sure don't show up," Pike says.

He declined to cite an example. Still, Pike says the system works great from a security standpoint. And if customers find it somewhat annoying, at least now they can know their time isn't being totally wasted.
Walsh75
Posts: 102
Joined: Fri Feb 20, 2009 10:54 am

Re: The North American Tour & Presale for members

Post by Walsh75 »

Oh and here is another bad example of the bad economic times, for those of you in "downriver" Detroit and nearby.

The Ticketmaster outlet that had been in Southland Mall is gone. It had been there most, if not all, of my 33 years. The last time I bought from there was back in July to pick up some lawn seats for DTE Music Theatre.

I went in the other day to try and get some event tickets for a family member and discover it was gone.

So now there is no longer any Ticketmaster outlet in this area. We're out of luck if we want to pay in cash so it's TM.com only or arena box offices directly from now on. (I don't know of many ppl that do box office direct unless it's the actual day of a show)

I don't know if they will continue with plans, but I heard on the news a few months ago that Blockbuster stores were thinking of getting into the ticket selling biz.
da2008
Posts: 360
Joined: Mon Jun 30, 2008 8:01 pm

Re: The North American Tour & Presale for members

Post by da2008 »

FWIW, I got my two single to the Radio City show at around 10:10 and 10:27 through the regular (not gold) Amex presale. I checked again at 10:30 and got nothing. But until 10:27 I was pulling singles without any problems. Never doubles though.
TheWalrus
Posts: 17
Joined: Fri Feb 27, 2009 8:20 pm

Re: The North American Tour & Presale for members

Post by TheWalrus »

I got two additional tickets online for the Edmonton show - 10th row, floor seating.

I was worried, used a code to get two seats last week, and am now contemplating selling those. (if anyone's interested, PM me). I haven't decided whether or not to keep them, but if I do sell two (26th row, floor seating) I'll be sure and let everyone on here know.
woolwork
Posts: 26
Joined: Fri Jan 16, 2009 6:18 pm
Location: new york city

Re: The North American Tour & Presale for members

Post by woolwork »

there were no guarantees... but ticketmaster is so inept...

first the advance page kept saying check back at 10am for LA and NYC... so i called their 800 # after being on hold til nearly 20 after 10 a human being picked up - and offered me seat 409 in row HH - came to $275... or so ... but i was thrilled... gave the man all my info... and then he asks me again... he lost the ticket... and then there was nothing available...

asking for a supervisor got me another customer service rep... meanwhile the ticketmaster site still says check back at 10am...

a friend suggested typing in LC NYC in the top bar and this did bring me to a live page but by then all the tickets had been sold... my friend did luck out and got 2nd row in the first mezz... i'm happy for him... but terrified that some glitch will interfere with saturday's presale (for the LCF)

though the amex pre-sale is supposed to be all week... i assume this is it, its over and done...
jane
lisa619
Posts: 1
Joined: Mon Mar 02, 2009 8:10 pm

Re: The North American Tour

Post by lisa619 »

jarkko wrote:
The password and links to the sellers will be announced ONLY here at The Leonard Cohen Forum when each of the presales begins.

- Tentative second days will be confirmed or removed from the plans later. That's why they are not listed.
Greetings, fellow Leonard Cohen fans: "jarkko", much appreciation for posting this link for the upcoming pre-sale. I trust that many of us are anticipating this chance to be in the same room with Mr. Cohen and his music, poetry, stories. Good luck to all~Cheers! Lisa
geracohen
Posts: 1
Joined: Mon Mar 02, 2009 9:54 pm

Re: The North American Tour & Presale for members

Post by geracohen »

Are the tickets different for the members sale than for the American Express presale for Los Angeles that started this morning?
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st theresa
Posts: 430
Joined: Wed Jan 18, 2006 7:24 pm
Location: Edmonton Alberta

Re: The North American Tour & Presale for members

Post by st theresa »

Interesting --I got my ticket at presale for about $120 at the Jack Singer concert hall which now appears to be sold out if you go through regular channels. However I found this link: http://orders.tickettriangle.com/Result ... nard+Cohen
which appears to have tickets on the balcony for a bit more than I paid Row J --$540. I am in row J Center balcony for $120--Thanks again for the presale info Jarkko. Scalpers I guess. But it looks like they may have been in on the presale too.
da2008
Posts: 360
Joined: Mon Jun 30, 2008 8:01 pm

Re: The North American Tour & Presale for members

Post by da2008 »

These are definitely scalpers. In 99% of all cases the only sources of tickets are ticketmaster and/or venue box office.
mousiki
Posts: 2
Joined: Mon Mar 02, 2009 11:10 pm

Re: The North American Tour & Presale for members

Post by mousiki »

Hi,

I was waiting soooo long for these tickets to go on sale this morning for Chicago.
I should have known I had no chance ---without going bankrupt.--

Its sad that they were bought by companies with only profit in mind.
Unfortunately for us true fans of Leonard Cohen, that run and buy his records,
there is no space to be present at one of his concerts.

That's ashame.-----
Locked

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