Mail order: B-

If I were giving out grades after the first leg of summer tour, this would be an F. Phish Ticketing can’t be blamed for the fact that more people want to go to shows than there are tickets, but between the all or nothing mail order results and not being willing to look at any of the scalper fighting techniques that other bands have invented while Phish was broken up, the system feels a little dated. Phish were cutting edge for a while there but now they’ve been passed by many bands.

However, it appears that between the first and second leg of summer tour, the system has changed from being a single lottery where you got all of the shows that could be filled when your number came up, to an individual lottery for each show. This minor tweak spread the orders around nicely. It seemed like a lot more people were getting tickets in the fall tour lottery than on previous legs. This is a much desired tweak and is appreciated.

Web Page: B+

Since the band has returned, tours are now announced with a video. This seems like a minor change, but in terms of drumming up excitement for the shows, it’s been quite dramatic. Every time I had a doubt about flying cross country twice in a 24 hour period, I watched the Fenway video and got fired up again.

The “From the Road” section has also been a massive improvement. Admittedly, in the era of iPhones, it’s easy to get information out, but the updates on Phish.com have been exceedingly quick and more reliable than a Twitter feed. We’ve come a long way since 12/31/02 where I had to use my Palm Phone to try to update the setlist live, leading to a 5 minute delay to put out the midnight song because all of the phone lines were jammed.

The album game on Festival 8 – while marred by requiring so much side scrolling that most people ended up going to either the Jamtopia page or even the back end XML file on Phish.com to see what had been eliminated – has sparred endless conversation about what should or shouldn’t be played, what would be a good choice or a horrid one, what potential trick Phish could do to play a different album. This has been such a popular game that even Phantasy Phish has actually mostly been talking about Phish recently. Kudos.

Unfortunately, the other Flash game for F8 was the one misstep. The game itself was cute, had had some funny moments like the sudden appearance and destruction of Alaska, but it ran way too long. Moreover, while the destruction and eventual return of California did provide some buzz, it was almost all negative. People booked flights early based on the really reliable rumors, and had to go through a few weeks where they were scared that they were going to lose money. I see the humor there, but it kind of backfired in this case, making everyone angry instead of amused. Joking is fine, but in this economy, you don’t want your most loyal fans to feel secure in being able to buy cheap airfare. If nothing else, that gives them more money to spend on concert tickets and LivePhish. Unfortunately, this leads us to the biggest failing of Phish 3.0.

Announcement of Dates: F

It didn’t start out that way. Hampton was announced with tons of time for people to make plans and the first leg of Summer Tour seemed like it was the same. Then they suddenly announced an extra Knoxville show, but that was only a few days later and didn’t really affect anyone’s plans. Then they announced the other Jones Beach and Fenway show, with barely enough time to get decent airfare and that did cause people to have to blow up their itineraries and start over.

Then we had the whole fiasco with Festival 8, where everyone knew where it was but the official website intentionally tried to make people think it wasn’t there, making a lot of people too nervous to lock in incredibly low airfare. Fortunately, flights stayed cheap, but that could have easily led to a much lower attendance.

Finally, here we are, less than a week away from Halloween, and NYE still hasn’t been announced. The smart money has been saying there will be a return to Miami, but the band is saying nothing. Meanwhile plane tickets are getting more and more insane – a quick check this morning showed that Seattle to Miami on those dates is over $700 per person – and people are understandably getting frustrated. The staggered and late ticket announcement feels like a game, some way of getting people to buy more tickets because the shows they really care about aren’t available yet. That will only work so many times before people just get frustrated. I’ve never missed a Phish New Year’s Eve concert but I’m actually asking myself this year if I can afford to go.

This is the big issue. Yeah it would be nice if Phish could have cooler shirts and mail order became a little less scalper friendly, but timely announcements are the difference between people going to shows and people deciding that the whole thing is more pain than it’s worth. Things are moving in the right direction. Fix this for 2010 and everyone will be happy.

*****

David Steinberg got his Masters Degree in mathematics from New Mexico State University in 1994. He first discovered the power of live music at the Capital Centre in 1988 and never has been the same. His Phish stats website is at www.ihoz.com/PhishStats.html.

He is the stats section editor for The Phish Companion and is on the board of directors for the Netspace Foundation. You can read more of his thoughts at http://www.livejournal.com/users/thezzyzx.

Pages:« Previous Page