Fans can't grab McCartney tickets

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Fans can't grab McCartney tickets

BY JEFF DEDEKKER, LEADER-POST
APRIL 26, 2013


Fans were left frustrated by the ticket pre-sale Thursday morning for Paul McCartney's upcoming Regina concert.

Lance Hackewich has a theory about what caused the problems.

Hackewich, who estimates he attends 50 concerts a year, attempted to buy tickets for the Aug. 14 show at Mosaic Stadium. Like many others, he came up empty-handed.

"Not that long ago, pre-sales weren't that popular. Not everybody knew about pre-sales. Now you have radio stations sending out emails to everybody telling everybody what's going on," Hackewich said.

"The secret is now out. There were times in the past when getting tickets through pre-sales wasn't a problem. Now that the word is out, it's become quite common for lots of people to take advantage of the pre-sales."

Tickets for the concert go on sale to the general public at 10 a.m. Monday, but Thursday marked the first of two pre-sales for the show. Tickets were available through McCartney's website, and when the site opened for business at 10 a.m., it didn't take long for fans to realize it would be a tough morning.

While many were fortunate to experience the thrill of victory with the purchase of up to four tickets, many others were left frustrated by the experience as it appeared the volume of ticket requests overwhelmed the site's computer server.

"We were trying all sorts of little tricks we've learned over the years and nothing was working today," Hackewich said. "It would even give us tickets and then when we went to pay for them we'd get the message, 'Network error.'"

Hackewich has attended major shows at Mosaic Stadium - the Rolling Stones, AC/DC and Bon Jovi - and said getting tickets for those shows was quite painless.

"All of those other big concerts went rather smoothly for me. I got all the tickets I needed," he said.

Despite coming up empty on Thursday, he isn't deterred from taking another shot at it on Friday morning with the Live Nation presale through Ticketmaster.

"It's the luck of the draw. It really is," he said.

Live Nation did not respond to an interview request.



Tickets for Paul McCartney's Regina show were hard to come by Thursday.
Photograph by: Getty Images, Leader-Post