If you thought the cost of seeing live music was getting a little out of hand, imagine having to only cough up £2.50 (that’s approximately $5, yo!) for a ticket to a music festival.
That’s exactly what occurred at London’s Hyde Park last Friday with a 17-strong event headlined by seminal heavy-rockers Black Sabbath, not to mention support from Soundgarden, Faith No More, Motorhead, Soulfly, and Wolfmother all for the price of a couple of coins.
Insane, right? Well, get this – tickets to the event, titled British Summer Time, were actually meant to fetch between £50 (AUD$ 93) and £295 (AUD$ 540).
Before your mind starts racing as to how so many people journeyed back through time to pay 1970s ticket prices to witness such rock legends, there is one hilarious answer that doesn’t involve time portals but in fact a computing glitch, allowing what would have been costly tickets to fly out of the digital box office for £2.50 ($5), as reported by Loudwire (via A Journal of Music Things)
So just how did these fortune-faded punters get their mitts on such cheap tix? An e-mail from AEG Live, the promoters of the Black Sabbath-headlined festival, sent to “companies that are connected with the promoter” containing special staff discounted tickets was leaked to the general public, which as you can imagine, were pounced on instantaneously, resulting in thousands snapping up tickets with the loose change in their pocket.
Amidst fears that “anyone who hasn’t purchased from a work email address that isn’t associated with the company will have them cancelled,” ticketing company AXS confirmed that all stubs purchased for £2.50 would in fact be honoured.
Confirming the situation on the venue’s twitter account, BST-Hyde Park confirmed the ticketing glitch:
@EwanPalmer A leaked staff offer meant the public could purchase reduced tickets. This has now stopped. Tickets purchased remain valid.
— BST Hyde Park (@BSTHydePark) June 27, 2014
So basically those lucky few thousand caught an all-star-studded line-up for the cost of a pot of beer, in a situation that better benefited punts in the the UK better than the ticket balls-ups experienced by Moshtix and their hacked ‘50% off option’ for Splendour In The Grass tickets earlier this year. The real question however is how much promoters lost out by honouring such bargain basement tickets.
It’s understandable if your complexion is a nasty shade of green after so many got to dig some of rock’s greatest talent for damn cheap. Imagine rubbing it in to your old man’s face that you too got to see Black Sabbath for $5, take that Pop!
(Photo: Tarrant Yields. Source: Black Sabbath Tone Deaf Photo Gallery)
