Radiohead fans have reported losing out on tickets due to being the wrongful victim of anti-tout measures while buying tickets for their new tour.
Fans had their tickets cancelled after being wrongfully flagged as a bot, and others were entirely logged out of the sale.
The news comes after Radiohead announced a new tour last month, with a selection of November dates at Greenwich’s O2 Arena as well as a handful of shows across Europe.
Radiohead’s public crusade third-party resale sites
The announcement of Radiohead’s brand-new tour was accompanied by another, unwanted phenomenon.
More than 1,000 potentially fraudulent tickets were quickly plastered across third-party resale sites – before they’d even been officially released on Ticketmaster’s official ticket-selling platform, AXS.
Radiohead’s band manager, Julie Calland, told the Guardian: “Radiohead have always strived to protect their audience from exploitative ticket touts, which in the absence of robust government legislation, becomes increasingly challenging,”.
To limit the ability of touts to use methods like bots to hoover up tickets, the band handed out unlock codes for fans to access the sale, as well as implementing stringent anti-bot measures on the site.
With a designation of one unlock code per email, enough codes were only distributed to match 120% of the capacity for each venue.
Before the sale had even started, many fans had already missed out.
The morning of the sale
As the Radiohead ticket sale arrived, Andreas, 53, was looking forward to trying for tickets.
A fan of the band since the 90s, he was hoping to surprise his son with tickets for his 21st birthday.
‘He is a huge fan’, Andreas remarked, ‘It would have been such a fantastic way to celebrate his 21st birthday together’.
However, the problems were immediate once Andreas tried to log onto the sale.
The waiting room kept crashing, and Andreas was unable to get into the sale for 30 minutes.
Once he gained access, Andreas continued to receive error messages stating that his IP address was not visible, which blocked his access to the sale.
After another 30 minutes of Andreas working out the specific Wi-Fi setting that blocked his access to the sale, he finally got through – only to find that only VIP tickets, out of his price range, were left.
Andreas said: “Whilst I get they are trying to make it fair and avoid bots and people cheating with multiple devices, there were so many different hoops to jump through.
“We already had an unlock code, so that should have been enough.
“I knew that it would have always been a long shot, but the ticket sale was stressful and unclear. It was terrible.
“The biggest joke of all was that I later had a look and there were already third-party sites offering tickets for extortionate prices, so they went through the effort and yet these tickets were all being used to make a quick profit.
“AXS need to sort out their platform as the sale was very poorly implemented”.
Another Radiohead fan, Ben, 24, said he was lucky enough to get tickets just before they sold out, after previously being kicked out of the sale with just four tickets in his basket.
He said: “I’m getting to a point with ticket buying, which is putting me off wanting to try to get them. It’s a huge amount of stress each time.
“It’s almost like trying to defuse a bomb: one wrong move kills any chance of getting a ticket”.
Radiohead tickets confirmed – or maybe not?
For an unfortunate section of Radiohead fans, the relief from getting tickets was short-lived.
Clara, 30, said she has been a huge fan of the band her entire life.
She was meant to see Radiohead play just after the 2017 Ariana Grande Concert terrorist attack in Manchester, and her tickets were refunded after she was too anxious to go.
Alongside her boyfriend and brother, she had secured tickets to see Radiohead for the first time at the O2 Arena.
But her Radiohead dreams were abruptly ended on the evening of the sale, as AXS cancelled her group’s tickets due to being ‘unable to verify aspects of her transaction’.
According to section 20 of the AXS purchase agreement, customer services must reach out to a customer if they have received incorrect payment or billing.
In Clara’s case, however, her group’s tickets were cancelled without any notice.
She said: “We logged onto a chat with their customer service and gave them all the details that they were asking for, and they basically said they couldn’t help us.
“So, when we replied mentioning the terms of their purchase agreement, they just said we can’t help with this issue any further, please raise a ticket.
“They just shut the conversation down basically”.
Sam, 52, who’s living in St. Albans, encountered the same problem. A Radiohead fan for 30 years, he bought four Tuesday tickets seated together – for 10 hours at least.
He then received an email from AXS saying that his order had been cancelled. His response Like Clara, AXS ‘had been unable to verify aspects of the transaction’.
To make matters worse, when contacting customer services afterwards, he was locked out of his AXS account for 24 hours due to ‘looking like bot traffic’.
Sam said: “I feel even worse for my friends (that he got tickets with). They’re an Italian couple who booked a flight from Italy as soon as the tickets were ‘confirmed’”.
Tour sold out – but no ‘karma’ for missed out fans
Despite the ticket woes of a few fans, Radiohead’s tour still quickly sold out, according to their website.
Julie Calland, speaking on behalf of the band to The Guardian, labelled the ticket sale process: “An attempt to deliver tickets as fairly as possible directly to fans at the price the band intended”.
Despite feeling that the band’s intentions were ‘really good’, Clara expressed concerns over the infrastructure AXS had used, and doubted whether they had sufficiently prepared for the high volume of fans attempting to buy tickets.
Clara said: “It wrongly suspected people of being bots, and they should have complied with their own legal consumer rights by checking our IDs or checking for a human before cancelling out tickets”.
Although she plans to try again for tickets in the resale later this month, she is ‘angry’ at AXS.
No fan who spoke to The Londoner had been able to reach a positive consensus with AXS, although one fan, who wished to remain anonymous, claimed that they would escalate their case to Trading Standards and STAR (Society of Ticket Agents and Retailers).
AXS did not respond for comment.
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