At 11:30 a.m., I entered the “waiting room” to buy tickets to this year’s edition of Portola Festival, the two-day extravaganza of dance music that will take place at Pier 80 on Sept. 20 and 21.
As an attendee for each of the past three years, I was given access to the “past purchaser” pre-sale, with tickets set to drop at noon on Wednesday. I knew that some people had run into glitches when buying Portola passes in the past. But I crossed my fingers and prayed for smooth sailing when 12 p.m. arrived.
The festival’s organizers couldn’t fuck this up again, right?
Wrong. Lo and behold, by 12:05, the entire digital queue froze up. Instead of seeing how many people were ahead of me in line, I got an update telling me that my internet connection had dropped, when it really had not. Was festival organizer Goldenvoice gaslighting me?
Sigh. Another year, another ticketing headache for what is arguably the city’s best music festival.
Naturally, the Portola Festival forum on Reddit exploded with discontent as the crisis unfolded, with hundreds of reactions and comments from frustrated fans who ran into the same issue as me — or worse.
Some allegedly never received their presale codes, despite registering as a past purchaser. Some who did also ran into the same “disconnected” internet warning that I had received. Some poor souls were booted from the queue when they refreshed the website in hope of addressing the holdup. Others still were turned away when the glitched system perceived them as having surpassed the 10-minute limit to check out and pay for passes — even though they had been stuck waiting in digital purgatory.
At best, you got an update that stated “the line is paused.” That’s where I landed, and the 30 more minutes of waiting felt like an eternity, complete with useless “updates.”
At least, after a lot of unexpected waiting, I finally secured two passes without further issue. Many others ran into bigger delays, and some were unable to get a pass amid the chaos.
What’s the big deal? Well, the festival has grown in attendance each year, and 2024 was the first time that Portola sold out of two-day general admission passes. In addition, the tiered price system means that said pass can jump from $400 to $450 in a hurry if you’re a little late to buy — a considerable hike for an already expensive event (in comparison, Outside Lands costs $539 for three days of music).
As one pissed-off fan wrote on Reddit: “axs/goldenvoice has really shit the bed on this presale…. this is so fucking disappointing.”
(I reached out to Goldenvoice for comment on the fracas; it did not respond by press time.)
Errors and glitches aren’t exactly a rare occurrence in the world of online ticketing, but two factors stand out.
Goldenvoice and ticketing platform AXS are supposed to be dominant, experienced juggernauts in the field of live entertainment, having run the biggest tours and festivals in the world. Anschutz Entertainment Group, which owns both subsidiaries, rakes in billions of dollars each year in revenue and now basically controls the concert market alongside fellow corporate behemoth Live Nation Entertainment.
In other words, they’re supposed to have their shit together, not give their most loyal fans a massive dose of stress over the most basic chokepoint in the entire ticketing process: The initial rush of digital buyers, which can obviously impact server bandwidth with sheer volume.
Today’s fiasco proved that, nope, the bar for expectations isn’t merely low. It’s in the Mariana Trench. Good thing I paid $34 in service fees for the privilege of this experience.
How will they surprise us next year?
