It was a neat premise: the reunited LCD Soundsystem, one of the bands that helped put the national spotlight on north Brooklyn’s music scene 15 years ago, playing a victory lap of hometown shows to open Brooklyn Steel, a new East Williamsburg concert hall owned by the regional concert promotions giant The Bowery Presents. James Murphy and crew christening the huge, gleaming, 1,800 capacity venue felt like a cap on the area’s transformation into a moneyed cultural mecca–something like the indie rock version of Jay Z opening Barclays Center with a string of shows in 2012. Unfortunately, and perhaps fittingly, it seems like no one in Brooklyn was able to actually get a ticket.
The tickets for the shows, which run April 6-11, went on sale today at noon, and sold out within minutes. A Twitter search for “LCD Soundsystem tickets” turns up lots and lots of fans who were upset at not being able to buy them, with some speculating that they’d been snapped up by bots employed by scalpers. On the secondary ticket market StubHub, there are dozens of scalped tickets listed for $260 each and upward at the time of this writing. Tickets to the shows were initially listed for $59.50.
Tickets went on sale 8 mins ago, I was "in line" with several fans of the music, these people are not fans of the music @lcdsoundsystem pic.twitter.com/hni10jvBqB
— Reilly O'Donnell (@reillyodonnell) March 30, 2017
Was any real human actually able to get LCD Soundsystem tickets for @BkSteelNYC on @axs? Really doesn't seem like it.
— Blake Robinson (@blake) March 30, 2017
Venting: bots bought all the LCD Soundsystem tix that went on sale at noon today. Dozens already on sale on Stubhub for $300.
— Lauren Leatherby (@LaurenLeatherby) March 30, 2017
After frustrated fans began making noise on Twitter, Brooklyn Steel’s account tweeted that it will attempt to combat scalpers by only distributing e-Tickets on the day of a given show, and that ticket distributor AXS will conduct a review of all orders “to make sure only fans get tix.”
After overwhelming demand, @lcdsoundsystem's shows at @BkSteelNYC sold out in minutes…(cont'd) #LCDxBKS
— Brooklyn Steel (@brooklynsteel) March 30, 2017
(cont'd) No eTickets will be distributed before day-of-show after @axs reviews all orders to make sure only fans get tix. #LCDxBKS
— Brooklyn Steel (@brooklynsteel) March 30, 2017
We’ve reached out to representatives of The Bowery Presents for additional information on how the review will be conducted, and for additional comment on the LCD Soundsystem sale. We’ll update this post if we hear back.
