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Hopefully Real People Will Be Able to Buy Tickets to the Newly Announced LCD Soundsystem Residency

INDIO, CA - APRIL 24: Musician James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem spins at Despacio during day 3 of the 2016 Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival Weekend 2 at the Empire Polo Club on April 24, 2016 in Indio, California. (Photo by Matt Cowan/Getty Images for Coachella)

LCD Soundsystem have announced another round of shows at the New York venue Brooklyn Steel, which is interesting considering what happened the last time the band played there. Two months ago, they opened the new space with a five-night residency, which was overshadowed by a ticket fiasco in which those shows sold out within minutes due to a proliferation of ticket-buying bots, which then allowed scalpers to attempt to sell the tickets for quadruple the original price on StubHub and other third-party sites. Most of LCD’s genuine, human fans were left with the unenviable choice of either not seeing the band or paying a minor fortune to do so.

In response to this scam—which afflicts the online ticket purchase market generally—Brooklyn Steel tweeted that the venue was planning on thwarting scalpers by only distributing e-tickets on the day of the show. Last month, James Murphy took to Facebook to say that, although he loved doing the shows, he was frustrated at the ticketing situation. He gave an honest if unsatisfying explanation that it would make sense for LCD Soundsystem to simply book at a larger venue if only he wasn’t a bit precious about doing so:

we generally prefer medium sized venues over huge ones, but we also loathe overpriced stubhub bullshit, so we’re navigating this as best we can. honestly, a lot of this is down to me (james, still) being difficult when talking to our very lovely and capable managers and agents w/r/t larger venues… i’m always like “that seems insane!” when a properly big venue is proposed, since we’ve only ever played hollywood bowl, red rocks and MSG, all of which were “special” shows, so it’s just hard to get our heads around the fact that maybe many more people that we assumed want to see us perhaps DO want to see us. it’s been a very nice revelation, but oh dear it’s still hard to make sense of. what we don’t want: us in some mega-dome (looking like we think we belong in some mega-dome) playing to 1/16th of a full room, while someone says things like “well, we can curtain off the balconies so it doesn’t look so bad,” after telling us “you have to charge $180 a ticket for it to make any sense.”

what we also don’t want: tickets to our shows being sold for $1000 on eBay, and people who like our band standing outside crying because they bought some bogus barcode from some shit-heel scalper.
what we want: full shows that aren’t so big that you feel like you need binoculars to see if pat is actually behind the drums or if it’s louis ck or something.

One imagines that both LCD and Brooklyn Steel would only be reviving this partnership and the memories of capitalistic horrors it conjures if they had a concrete plan for making sure it didn’t happen again. We’ll be able to tell when tickets go on sale this Thursday at 10 AM ET.

SPIN has reached out to Brooklyn Steel and LCD Soundsystem’s representatives for further comment.

Update: Murphy explained his reasoning for playing more shows at Brooklyn Steel in another Facebook update. Murphy concluded “playing more seems to be the best antidote” to the ticketing issues, with the hopes that “maybe if no one buys a scalped ticket for more than the face value, the room will feel a little empty, but at least we’ll be done with this crap once and for all, as scalpers aren’t in it to troll music fans — they’re in it to make money, and if no one feeds them, the natural consequence is that they’ll just thin way the fuck out.” Read the statement in full below.