After huge success performing their Catalogue 12345678 career retrospective in Dusseldorf, New York and in London, the always-on-the-ball Fergus Linehan and crew have made a major coup by securing Kraftwerk as headliners for this year's Vivid festival. Over the course of 4 nights in May, the band will perform each of their 8 full-length albums, accompanied by 3D visuals drawn from their iconic artwork and performances. It's a rare opportunity to see one of the most influential bands of the last century.
But who knows if you'll get to go? The organisers are instituting a new ticket allocation system for the Kraftwerk shows whereby you enter an application with your list of desired performances. Once the entry period has closed, entries will be drawn at random and tickets issued to those selected. This is done in the name of fairness and as an effort to alleviate pressure on the Sydney Opera House website. Which, frankly, is fair enough.
For a long time the Sydney Opera House has had the best ticket buying system running for seated events. The ability to manually select your desired seats without scrambling to find an event-specific seating map or needing to transcribe low-res CAPTCHA graphics has been, by and large, a pleasure to use. Recently they have eliminated some of this functionality for the online sale of bigger shows, only allowing users to select a ticket price or seating area and then allocating them whatever was available. This has presumably been an effort to ease stress on the back-end of the system, but from a user perspective it merely resulted in site crashes, time-outs and unclear seating availability information. I'm hopeful that these are teething problems and that in future the Opera House's innovative manual selection process will be enhanced to cope with those high-traffic sale dates.
It's a gross abuse of, and by, any music fan to resell a concert ticket at an inflated price. So any effort to make ticket buying easier, and fairer, is a plus. While I'm also sure no one would want this cumbersome ticket allocation system to be instituted for events other than the Kraftwerk shows (all other Vivid events will be sold in the usual method - hopefully with manual seating selection available), it does seem apt that in order to attend the live show of the band that pioneered the creation of art through automation, we ourselves must surrender control to an automated, random ticket selection process. (As long as those online applications work!)
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