Wondering when?
Soon, very soon…
For 2019, lottery was open Nov 5-14
For 2018, lottery was open Nov 6-15
For 2017, lottery closed Nov 9
For 2016, lottery closed Nov 11
Thanks!!
Whooo Hooo!! I had a dream just last night that when I got to TP they wouldn’t let me in; said I missed the lotto. I guess that’s more of a nightmare really. C’mon November! :peace
I’m surprised PB hasn’t updated the webpage by now, announcing the lottery dates. Excitement filling the spooky air.
Happy Halloween everyone!
:festival Thinking that no prior notice would be fine?
Hummmmm… 
Has anyone checked out the new ticketing PB just announced? I’m a bit confused, and alot of this seems too much like ticket master. Anyone else confused/worried?
I’m more worried about the aftermarket for tickets than anything else. They didn’t mention anything about swaps or name changes on orders. Hopefully more details emerge this week before they announce sale dates.
I am still a little confused as well. It reads that PB will be getting rid of the traditional “lottery” and it sounds like it is first come, first served for TP/WF.
via FB … " So is the lottery for town park totally gone?"
PB: “YEP!”
See: “IMPROVED FAIRNESS”
I’m still confused reading the advice from PB. I hope it’s not a first in first served basis because tickets sales open at 2am here usually.
I am a bit sad, I loved the fun of the TP lottery. Will try to look on the bright side. I trust PB
Well folks, this is the end of an era. The lottery is gone, and with it, the way we work together in Town Park on a community basis may change as well. With the lottery, at least the drawings were random, so you had just about as good of a chance as any scalper to win, and if scalpers wanted to game the odds in their favour, they needed multiple addresses and credit cards, which made it inconvenient. On top of that, since we as a community worked hard to educate people not to purchase tickets from scalpers, many did not find TBF a profitable venue for ticket resale.
The other important thing to remember about the lottery was this, these were only for Town Park tickets, not for general festival tickets or camping at other sites. People who needed just 4 day passes or single day tickets did not enter the TP Lottery.
See Tickets is owned by Vivendi, which also owns Universal Music Group. Vivendi is a huge media conglomerate, based in Paris. Since they own UMG, it is always possible this may have an impact on the talent presented at the festival, but there is nothing yet to substantiate this. Here is their English web site, https://www.vivendi.com/en/, though quite a bit is still in French.
Now we are moving to a first-in first out virtual cloud based queuing solution. You can read about how it works here.
https://queue-it.com/first-in-first-out-queueing-feature/
The idea is that this is supposed to be “fairer” because each person online receives a unique ID the second that they log in, and requests are processed in that order. Supposedly, this system will improve your “experience of waiting” because you will be kept informed of your progress and have a more pleasant waiting experience. Again, the logic is, if you sit there and hang on to your connection for hours, you are obviously motivated and determined to buy the “product”. Another feature of this system is that for high volume, they could open up the queue say an hour or two before the sale. So, for folks like Leslie, you may be looking at spending hours on your computer sitting in a virtual queue at 2 AM.
Another question I have is this. Do we have to set up an account with See Tickets or PB with a form of payment before we even begin this queue process?
I know PB is trying to do the best it can to be fair to us. I just feel this system is open to more abuse than the lottery. First, if all types of tickets go on sale at once, people looking for just TP tickets will be overwhelmed. Next, the queue system can also be gamed. While you can filter out the most obvious bots, there really is nothing in place for scalpers to ask multiple "helpers’ to log on using multiple machines, and get past any “capcha” screens if necessary. Then identify which computers have the highest spots in the queue.
Next, we have to deal with the reliability of our internet connections over the period of waiting in the queue. If you lose your connection, you have lost your spot in line. If you try and do this with a mobile phone, good luck to you.
What really seems to have driven this decision was the overwhelming amount of work that PB staff had to accomplish with the old system. Now, they have just outsourced this work.
As for RFID, it is OK with me. As long as the wristbands can put up with the heat, cold, showers, jumping in the warm river, etc… that is fine. If not, then PB will have lots of unhappy festivarians.
My 2 cents, and we hope the TP camps can work together to make this a positive experience for all.
Confused? Yes, mainly about the resale process and how ‘See Tickets’ prevents scalping while allowing the face value ticket exchange we all love. Since it’s possible PB could have a customized process with ‘See Tickets’ we need to more details from them.
Some potentially helpful details …
https://www.seetickets.com/content/fan-to-fan-terms
I assume a 10% charge to a resale buyer would discourage scalpers and legit traders.
Worried? Not at all. New process, same goal. I’ll be bummed if I don’t “win the queue game”, but I’ve lost the lottery more often than not and that hasn’t kept me away. Technology and process outsourcing won’t cause me to lose faith in karma/the festivarian gods (yet).
This change was bound to happen. By posting this, I hope the ‘See Tickets’ machine learning algorithms that mine internet user data and activity will notice me as a festivarian and not a bot, so I get through the queue with ease.
You right about that. Most of us miss the lottery and still find tickets because our commitment to be in town park. I don’t think that will change. Some changes on the front end, yeah, but come summer solstice I think we will still all be in town park enjoying each others company! It’s not easy for PB to do everything in house, especially with how fast tech is changing the game. They’ve got my support and I hope folks keep a positive vibe about the change. See yall in June!
RFID wristbands make sense. I see these at more and more shows/events including Formula 1 race I attended this past weekend. RFID technology is secure and I do think they make entry at the gate more efficient. My concern is bots, scalpers, etc. Ticketmaster, etc have their ‘verified fan’ methods, captchas, etc, as do others, that supposedly eliminate or greatly reduce the tix that end up in the hands of scalpers. I’m just not convinced they do…but I will stay optimistic that PB will get it right!
Please help, I have no idea what this RFID tech is, and more bothersome, I can’t find anything on Planet Bluegrass. I ought to be getting Notes from PB, don’t have anything, when I click it above this forum, get an Error response. Opening the festival page of the main site brings me nothing. I’m always anxious about tickets tho I’ve mastered the online sprint. Now I’m worried there will be some sort of new tech I won’t be able to figure out. (No smart phone . . . does that automatically make me exempt from ever getting tickets?) Any reassurance will be appreciated!
Without the lottery I’m concerned how much harder it will be to get a Town Park vehicle pass.
I personally don’t have to worry about the Town Park camping pass aspect, but I’ve pretty much had to rely on my festivarian friends to come up with the vehicle pass.
Are they going to mail out the vehicle pass stickers as well as the RFID wristbands?
If so, it’s going to be hard to figure out who has them or needs them.
I just hope this doesn’t mean the end of some of the veteran campsites.
Only time will tell.
:huh
RFID is radio frequency identification. Basically, it is a chip that is activated by radio waves which can track your movements and send that information out to be gathered by an information storage system. Not only can the chip be programmed to provide access to an event, if programmed in a certain way it could track your movements throughout the day. Like how long you are in the pit, backstage, or on the field, at the beer stand, at the food court, in the port-a-potty, in Town Park, and possibly track you throughout the town of Telluride.
Maybe the next step is facial recognition software. Then we may find out who the face on Mars really belongs to. :cheers