Bait and Switch.

    I am very angry today. I am angry at music promoters. I am very angry today at the music promoters behind Langerado. For those of you that don't know what Langerado is, let me fill you in.
    Langerado is a regional South Florida music festival. Langerado happened for many years during the 2000's in Markham Park in downtown Sunrise, near Ft Lauderdale. In 2008 Langerado had its most epic year when it relocated to Big Cypress, in the Everglades, and added camping to the festival. You would think the promoters would have followed it up with an even more epic event, yet something went wrong. The next year Langerado was relocated to downtown Miami! The ticket prices skyrocketed, camping was eliminated from the event, it was shortened to 2 days instead of three, and they ended up booking a bunch of bands like Gym Class Heroes, Dashboard Confessional, Snoop Dogg, and Zac Brown Band. Less than spectacular. It certainly did not help much that Phish decided to end their near decade long hiatus to reunite in Virginia that exact same weekend.
      So as one might imagine they did not sell a lot of tickets. They ended up canceling the event, and blamed sluggish ticket sales on the poor economy, instead of on their poor choice of lineup and location. Those of us who had enjoyed Langerado for what it once was lamented its demise. So how surprised were some of us yesterday when out of nowhere news began to spread that Langerado was returning! The excitement, however, would be short lived.
   The first clues that it would simply not be as epic as it once had been came in the form of it being moved back to the public park it was founded at. While the shows at Markham park were fun, there was still the logistics of finding a place to stay for two days, and driving back and forth along with 15,000 people every day to park and get in and out of the venue, a feat that could eat up HOURS. As well as once again not having camping the event was back down to 2 days.
     Another clue that something was fishy came in the announcement that the old promoters were no longer involved in the production of the festival, and that it had been sold to the people who put on Lollapalooza, one of the MOST CORPORATE music events in the world. For those of you unfamiliar with Lollapalooza, it was a touring festival that buckled in 2003, but was then bought out by the large music promoter C3. It introduced non-compete clauses for the artists that performed at it, so that they could not perform at any other location within 100 miles of Lollapalooza for 9 months before and after their festival appearance. This practice effectively screwed a lot of regional venues and promoters from being able to have top name acts perform in their clubs, and is currently the focus of a pending antitrust suit with the Illinois Attorney General. It is also the wonderful event that brought us the likes of Lady Gaga!
  Yet I digress. In order to try and build excitement for the launch of Langerado the promoters were offering early bird tickets today at 11am for 75 dollars, and anyone who wanted to purchase tickets for the festival had a chance to do so at half the regular asking price with one catch, the lineup would not be announced for several months still.
    So the nostalgia of Langerado crept up on me, and sure enough this morning I was up at 10:30 eagerly awaiting the window of purchase opportunity. I kept refreshing my browser every five seconds and then sure enough at 11 on the dot tickets become available. I quickly add one ticket to my cart, speedily release my credit card information to a sleazy promoter for a ticket to a concert with an unknown lineup and when I go to checkout, "There are not enough tickets available to complete this transaction". Not enough tickets? So less than the 1 I want to purchase?! It wasn't even 11:02 when I got this message. I don't know how many presale tickets they had available, but they all sold in less than 2 minutes. It does not even seem feasible considering the fact that I proceeded to checkout the second it was possible and was still not fast enough to get one ticket.
      Therefore I am calling Shenanigans on the producers. This was an obvious bait and switch. It is the same kind of shadiness one would expect on Black Friday. Get 1000 people to lineup all night to try and get the 100 dollar laptops you have advertised, but don't make any announcements to the fact that you only have 5 of them in stock, then when everyone is ready to buy say "Oh, they are all sold out, but we have more at regular price if you want". I expect these kind of tactics from Best Buy, but not from Langerado, a festival which still has a LOT of making up to do with the fans.
   A quick glimpse of the message boards on Facebook will easily mirror the feelings I am expressing right now, and it leaves one to question whether it is a good thing when your marketing gimmick produces more negative responses than positive. All I do know is I am a stubborn and prideful person, and I do not take kindly to being taken advantage of for marketing purposes. There are a lot of good festivals happening this year, too bad for Langerado they had to pull this crap, because my money spends just as well at Bear Creek and Blackwater.