Tickets for the Ke$ha and 3OH!3 concert on April 3 sold out shortly after ticket sales were opened to the general public on Monday morning.
On Saturday and Sunday, concert tickets were made available to Geneseo students exclusively; each student could purchase one student-priced ticket for $20 and up to five public-price tickets for $30 each. Online and telephone sales were opened up to the public beginning Monday morning.
According to the SA Ticket Office, approximately 1,100 student-priced tickets were sold in person, and 1,600 tickets were sold at general-public pricing. Of the general-public tickets, 500 were purchased online. Dianne Krenzer, SA Ticket Office service manager, said that many of the tickets sold online at the higher price were purchased by Geneseo students.
The pre-sale for students began at 10 a.m. on Saturday. Some students waited as long as three hours to purchase their tickets at the SA Ticket Office.
"We did not anticipate the time it would take for each ticket to be issued because of the controls we had in place to make sure that one student could only buy one student-priced ticket," said senior Doug Sinski, president of SA. "It ended up being about thirty seconds per transfer, limiting the amount of transactions that we could possibly have in those two days of pre-sale."
In addition to ticket sales online and at the Ticket Office, tickets were sold in packs to other colleges in the area. Tickets for these schools went on sale after Geneseo's pre-sale had ended.
"There was initially a sale to other colleges that was supposed to occur before student pre-sale," Sinski said. "[Rochester Institute of Technology], Binghamton [University] and [State University of New York at] Brockport all wished to buy tickets before the student pre-sale … When I heard that that was happening, I immediately put a stop to that and I made sure that all tickets that were for sale … would be offered to [Geneseo] students first."
RIT sold 88 tickets, Brockport sold 55 tickets and Binghamton sold 30, all after the pre-sale at Geneseo had ended.
As tickets sold out in the first three days, many Geneseo students are upset that they were unable to purchase tickets and expressed dissatisfaction with the two-day pre-sale.
Junior Martina Kunar said that she and many of her fellow classmates were unable to purchase tickets. "I'm disappointed because there were only two days of pre-sale and I know many people from my classes were not able to purchase tickets," she said.
Sophomore Sean Conner, who was also unable to purchase a ticket, expressed concern about the student pre-sale. "They allowed students to get up to six tickets, so students could automatically get tickets for their friends from other schools."
Junior Dana Livingston said she had been looking forward to the concert, but also missed out. "I was really disappointed I didn't get tickets," she said, "because I really wanted to get down and groovy!"
Sinski said SA did not anticipate this issue.
"There are only 2,700 tickets and there are 5,044 students that attend Geneseo," he said. "Obviously, even to begin with there's not enough tickets for every single student, but what we try to do at Student Association is … please the maximum amount of students per dollar spent … We sold tickets constantly Saturday and Sunday, but ultimately some students were gone that weekend, other students just didn't have the time to stand in line for three hours … We didn't anticipate that being an issue but obviously now, moving forward, we're definitely going to learn from that."
Senior Will Labate, SA director of student affairs, said that the ticket sale would be a learning experience for the organization.
"The whole point of students being able to buy five extra tickets was so that they could bring their friends … then again, their friends aren't fee-paying students," he said. "Maybe in the future we should limit it to two students they can buy tickets for rather than five and that way more Geneseo students would be able to actually get tickets and go to the concert."
Even with some student dissatisfaction with the ticket sale, SA is happy with this year's response to the spring concert.
"This concert is definitely a major success for the Student Association and for Geneseo," Labate said. "Events sometimes have flaws and it's something that can get better, and we will probably improve it next year."