Clarence Brown Theatre subscribers are now renewing their season tickets!

(It’s a bit of a madhouse here today as, in addition to selling next season’s tickets, we’re busy finishing up the runs of Copenhagen and Flyin’ West, and selling advance tickets to The Who’s Tommy, which opens next week).

(If you’re one of those subscribers who don’t use a computer, you probably aren’t reading this, of course…  But if you’re a suscriber and didn’t get the email yesterday telling you how to do this, it’s probably because we don’t have your email address — please call us at 974-5161 or email us to get on our email list so you’ll hear of things before anyone else!)

For anyone else interested, you can subscribe by calling the Box Office (865-974-5161) or for even more fun, purchase online at https://www.uttheatre.org/order.

Here’s the Clarence Brown Theatre 35th Anniversary Season Lineup for 2009-2010:

• A Streetcar Named Desire (starring Dale Dickey)
• The Flu Season
• Little Shop of Horrors
• A Christmas Carol
• Oedipus Rex
• Charley’s Aunt
• Speech and Debate
• Man of La Mancha

This blog’s author is in Chicago, attending the INTIX Conference & Exposition.  And he’s getting some help back home…

INTIX is short for the International Ticketing Association, which bills itself as “Advancing the Success of the Admission Services Industry”.  In other words, we sell tickets.

As some of you know, I love Chicago, due mainly to my yearly pilgrimages to Wrigley Field.  Unfortunately, the Cubs aren’t playing right now, so I’m not used to being here during the Winter. I’ve heard it gets cold…

But no, the weather forecasters promised “spring-like” weather today.  I love a good sense of humor!  True, the temperature did get into the low 40s, but with winds of 20-30 mph, with gusts up to 40 mph!  There was snow on the ground, and the Chicago River had huge chunks of ice.  And now, there’s an inch or two of new snow expected, with temperatures plunging perhaps 40 degrees.  I’m glad I brought the heavy coat.  Here’s a lovely view of Chicago from my hotel room:

The glass covered tower under construction center left is the new Trump Tower; the neo-gothic Tribune Tower is to the right.  in the foreground left is the icy Chicago River.  You might notice a tour boat at right shore at the bottom of the photo — it actually headed for Lake Michigan with a few hearty (foolhearty?) souls on board this afternoon.

At any rate, the conference starts in earnest tomorrow and I have many meetings scheduled as we try to figure out how to do our ticketing better.  It’s fun being in Chicago (I’ve already made one visit to the Billy Goat Tavern (the inspiration for “Cheezborger, Cheesborger”!)), but it’s going to be an exhausting week.

And just when you have everything planned out, life throws a curve — CBT Box Office Assistant Manager Sarah Burton had to undergo emergency surgery Sunday, so our student box office workers and other CBT’ers have stepped up big time to keep the box office running while we’re both gone.  There are a few bumps along the way that we’re smoothing as we go, but it is great to see our people rising to the occasion.  Things are in good hands back home.  A good “disaster planning” exercise…

Meanwhile, Sarah, continue your recovery, and we’ll be glad to see you as soon as you’re able!

Here’s your chance to show off your communications skills in front of the ticket-buying public.

Actually, we’re talking about UT students working in the Clarence Brown Theatre Box Office.

Good pay (OK, around minimum wage…), great benefits (free tickets, upon occasion) and you’ll have a great view right in the hub of theatre activity.  You’ll get a chance to meet the people who pay for all this art.  Former box office workers have often found themselves cast in plays or discovering other opportunities to advance their skills, and you get to hear all the good dirt.  It can also be fun sometimes!

We need two or three new box office associates right away – no ticket industry experience necessary – so rush over to the Clarence Brown Theatre Box Office and ask for Roger Hoover.  (We’re not firing anyone – but people do graduate, etc. as time goes on, so they don’t all stay here forever.)

You’ll need a resume with references and a copy of your class schedule and other work conflict information.  While we’d love to hire everyone, we’ll be looking mainly for people whose availabilities can fill the holes in our work schedule!  Oh, we also will want people who can continue to work next year.

* (Actually, non-actors are just as welcome – and sometimes more so, as they don’t tend to be cast in shows and become unavailable for work)

It looks like Hannah Montana went too far.  OK, not Hannah or Miley or whomever, but the ticket brokers who grabbed up tickets for her shows in Knoxville, Nashville, and Memphis and left pre-teen girls heartbroken perhaps went too far — and State Representative Curry Todd (R - Cordova/Germantown) plans to do something about it.

According to The Germantown News, Todd will introduce legislation limiting and regulating ticket scalpers’ activities:

Todd is reportedly working on restrictions that would put a four-ticket limit on tickets purchased through a ticket outlet. That limit would not include sporting events.

Other restrictions might be to set up a $500 or more registration fee for all ticket brokers, and require a $10,000 bond for businesses that employ “diggers” — people who camp out in box office lines to buy blocks of tickets and then resell them for 400 to 500 percent of their face value.

It’s interesting to see this reaction, but let’s hope the eventual bill is well-crafted.  Our regional theatre isn’t really affected by ticket brokers, and we need to make sure that there’s nothing in the legislation that could accidentally damage our day-to-day ticketing operations — for example, what’s a “ticket outlet”?  Without more specific identification, that could include everyday secondary sellers such as the University Center’s Central Ticket Office.

We’ll need to keep our eye on this…

It was strictly a coincidence that our ticketing system (running on Paciolan software) and the Colorado Rockies’ World Series ticket sales (running on Paciolan) failed on the same morning.

In our case, technicians at the University of Tennessee’s Tickets Unlimited had been trying all night to install a new router in order to add new capabilities to the system which serves not only the Thompson-Boling Arena but the Knoxville Civic Auditorium and Coliseum, Tennessee and Bijou Theatres, Broadway in Knoxville, Knoxville Symphony Orchestra, Knoxville Opera, and us, the Clarence Brown Theatre at the University of Tennessee.  Something went wrong, and they had to put the old router back on line.  Meanwhile, we had to put a few patrons’ sales on hold until the system was restored.

In the Rockies’ case, the online portion of the ticketing system was overwhelmed with demand for Rockies World Series home games.  The system crashed, and less than 500 of about 60,000 seats were sold on Monday, Oct. 22.  According to the Rocky Mountain News,

The Colorado Rockies will try again to sell World Series tickets through their Web site starting on Tuesday at noon.

Spokesman Jay Alves said tonight that the failure of Monday’s ticket sales happened because the system was brought down today by an “external malicious attack.”
…

The Rockies opted for an online sale of fewer than 20,000 tickets for each of the games in Denver, saying it was the fairest method for fans.

Paciolan Inc., which provides ticketing networks to Major League Baseball and 700 college and professional teams, was “amazed and overwhelmed” when it was flooded by 8.5 million hits for tickets in 90 minutes, Alves said.
…

Meanwhile, technicians at Irvine, Calif.-based Paciolan scrambled to fix the glitch.

“Right now, we have a couple dozen engineers that are in the back office trying to figure out exactly what the technical problems are,” Shaw Taylor, spokesman for Paciolan, said late this morning.

The head of the firm took responsibility for the crash, saying it affected the company’s entire North American system.

“This is not the Rockies’ fault in any way whatsoever,” said Paciolan CEO Dave Butler said. “We are working hard to address it.”

Paciolan’s Web site says the firm’s network systems sold 120 million tickets last year — about one-quarter of all live event tickets sold in the U.S.

Understandably, those wishing to buy tickets to the Rockies’ first-ever appearance in the World Series are not very happy.  YourHub (Denver) notes that this isn’t the first time that Paciolan’s internet sales have raised hackles before:

In a blog posting titled “eVenue Can Suck My B***” ( link) on Oct. 28, 2004, author sbutler summed up his frustration with the site after being denied tickets to a football game:

“Throwing together some stopgap, Band-Aid, horrible solution is never a good idea in the long run. If you haven’t sat down and thought seriously hard about the planning of your program, then someone needs to take away your keyboard and replace it with a whiteboard and markers.”

Alexa.com, a site that monitors Web sites reliability and global rank, listed evenue.net as “Very Slow (83% of sites are faster).” ( link)

Secondary ticket marketplace StubHub late Monday night had Saturday and Sunday Colorado home game tickets for sale at prices ranging from $712 to $17800 each. 

It’s still a developing story, but a cartoonist for the Rocky Mountain News has already captured the feeling of fans in Denver:

Boston Red Sox officials are preparing for the first game of the World Series on Wednesday night.  Their ticket sales (via Tickets.com) had already concluded without incident.  Tickets.com uses a different approach to high volume ticket sales, including a “virtual waiting room” in which those wishing to purchase tickets sit until the system is ready to process their ticket requests.  The virtual waiting room automatically checks the status at regular intervals, so there is no need for potential buyers to keep logging onto the web pages to try to buy the tickets.  It has been used successfully for several years for a number of venues — for example, they process over 600,000 tickets on the first day of single ticket sales for the Chicago Cubs each year. 

The World Series ticket problem rippled into other areas – ticketing at other Denver facilities also served by Paciolan was knocked out, and in fact Paciolan says their entire nationwide network was affected, as noted in this email from CEO Dave Butler:

Dear Roger,

Paciolan is currently experiencing technical difficulties with all Internet applications. We believe this is due to unprecedented response to the World Series onsale this morning. We are working to resolve this issue as quickly as possible. We are also investigating the possibility of a large-scale denial of service attack.

We know that this has impacted your business negatively and apologize for this. We will communicate with you later in the day after we resolve the current issues and determine the root cause.

Sincerely,

Dave Butler
CEO, Paciolan

Actually, I haven’t been able to tell that our Internet sales were actually down at all, but some in other area were hurt.  I suppose we’re lucky that Hannah Montana didn’t bring us down a few weeks ago.  We were without our ticketing system for an hour or two this morning; the Rockies’s sales were delayed a least a day, and much goodwill was lost. 

It is not surprising that there was a lot of demand from Colorado fans for their first-ever World Series tickets, but I believe it unreasonable to think that that the demand was “unprecedented”.  Everytime my Cubs get into the playoffs they gobble up every ticket in sight within an hour or two.  (In the other team’s town too!!!)  Rockies’ ticket demand was heavy, and whether it was due to faulty design of the ticket processing system or to a lack of controls to mitigate a malicious attack, the system just didn’t work.

These two breakdowns were a coincidence.  That we must take a fresh look at our ticketing partners is not.

You have to be careful about how you do some things (reference “The Law of Unintended Consequences”).

Take ticketing, for example — pretty simple, right?  You have seats, you have tickets that match them and you sell them.  Easy enough from the Box Office, but you can sell more through outlets or other phone rooms, or this great new thing called the Internet, right?

But things can go wrong.  Take Missoula, Montana, for instance — Elton John is coming to town for a concert, and with high demand for tickets expected, the Adams Center at the University of Montana set up a special system to make sure everything went smoothly.

It didn’t.

As reported in the Missoulian:

The system was complicated; and when all was said and done, it just plain didn’t work.Wednesday morning, thousands of area residents found they were unable to purchase tickets for the Sept. 28 concert by Elton John, scheduled to take place at the Adams Center in Missoula. Tickets to the concert sold out in less than one hour; yet people who showed up to participate in the in-person wristband lottery purchasing system at local ticket outlets were left almost entirely in the cold.Not a single person was able to buy tickets at the University Center on the University of Montana campus. Campus police were obliged to step in after people began throwing their wristbands at Adams Center director Mary Muse. 

We certainly don’t like the sound of that…

What happened?

How that happened is still, according to University officials, unclear. This much is known: the Adams Center recently upgraded its GrizTix ticketing system, adding additional capacity for online purchasing. The vast majority of tickets to the concert ended up being sold online in a matter of minutes.

Even so, many people who attempted to purchase tickets online found themselves locked out from the get-go.

“Myself and three other family members in Missoula, Whitefish, Glasgow and friends of ours in Montana - a total of 10 people - were all online to buy tickets as well as on the phone at the same time,” wrote Darcel Wesen in an e-mail to the Missoulian. “Right at 10 a.m. I received a message that the tickets were sold out (via GrizTix.com).

“This was a complete fiasco.”

Fortunately, we haven’t had this problem yet at the Clarence Brown Theatre.  But we do note that the “Hannah Montana” concert was sold out rather quickly through Tickets Unlimited.

Oh, what ticketing system does GrizTix (and UT) use?

Paciolan.

Measure twice, cut once department…

From the Ipswitch (U.K.) Evening Star:

HUNDREDS of theatregoers have today been asked to send back tickets to Ipswich’s Regent theatre after seat numbers had to be reallocated.

Though most shows are unaffected, theatre manager Hazel Clover has written to some customers asking them to send back tickets because seats were sold in advance of a £500,000 13-week refurbishment.

The letter said replacing the theatre’s 78-year-old 1,600 seats had resulted in some changes to row numbers and seat numbers.

One theatregoer, who did not wish to be named, said: “The main thing is the theatre is going to have lovely new seats. “I didn’t realise at first we would have to send tickets back. I don’t mind but it must be expensive for the theatre to send tickets to a fro.”

We know how costly mailing to a fro goes, I suppose.  We prefer to count our seats before they sell them.

Toronto-based Audienceview has been a rising star among ticketing systems providers for arts organizations.  Now, it’s expanding more into other areas, including big-time college athletics.

As Ticketnews.com reports, the company has added the University of Minnesota’s athletic ticketing to the arts side they already provided:

Toronto-based ticket solutions provider AudienceView, already ticketing the University of Minnesota’s Arts department activities, has now picked up the university’s Golden Gopher athletic events, which includes 25 men’s and women’s varsity sports teams in the Big Ten Conference and Western Collegiate Hockey Association. Ticket sales started August 15 at the box office, online, and by phone.

The athletic ticketing for Minnesota was formerly provided by college athletics powerhouse Paciolan, which is being purchased by industry leader Ticketmaster.  Ironically, Paciolan just added the Concerts/Arts side of the University of Tennessee’s ticketing to its exisiting athletics contract.

Just ask Roger how he feels about Paciolan…