By By Eric Allen, News Staff

Tickets for the Springfest concert to be held April 4 sold out in two days, said Springfest Concert Chair Nani Stoick. They went on sale Monday at 7 p.m., and high traffic caused delays, but did not cause the ticketing website to crash.
The sale date for the tickets was pushed back to Monday from the previous Thursday so technical improvements could be made to prevent problems that occurred with the sale of tickets for the Oct. 17 Jon Stewart show.
‘There weren’t any major snafus. We averaged 1,000 tickets every 15 minutes for the first hour and then it dropped off,’ said Stoick, a junior music industry major. ‘For the most part, everybody is fine with the way things worked.’
There was, however, a glitch in the ticketing site that allowed about 200 students to buy tickets before Monday at 7 p.m.
‘[Information Services] accidentally set it for midnight instead of 7 p.m.,’ Stoick said. ‘It wasn’t open for very long ‘- just a couple of minutes.’
A representative from Information Services did not return immediate phone calls for comment last night.
Stoick said that despite tickets selling out more quickly in past years, she is happy with the way things went. She explained that the website now only allows a certain number of people to buy tickets at a time, which makes the process take longer, accounting for why the tickets tended to sell more slowly.
‘We were doing something completely different,’ she said. ‘When you do something new, it doesn’t go perfectly.’
When students purchased tickets, the website gave them choices for picking them up, like will call, delivery and pick-up. Stoick said that despite the options, everyone should pick up their tickets from the Blackman Auditorium box office before the date of the concert. She also said that when students pick up their tickets, they need to show their NU ID and it would be helpful to present their receipt as well. It isn’t necessary to bring the receipt, she said, but it will make picking up the tickets easier.
Jessica Bass, a freshman biology major, said she noticed the improvents to the ticketing website, although she did not like having to wait to purchase tickets.
‘We were clicking for so long,’ Bass said of herself and her friend, freshman international affairs major Lindsey Voet. ‘It took forever to get through but it was definitely an improvement on Jon Stewart. That was a disaster.’
Although she was happy with the site’s improvements, Bass said she’d prefer if the website told ticket purchasers how long they had to wait, instead of requiring them to keep clicking ‘Continue.’ She also said she was unable to purchase two tickets at once, so she and Voet had to each purchase a ticket separately.
‘When we finally pushed ‘Return’ and got the tickets, we were surprised,’ Voet said. ‘It was kind of exciting.’
Despite a longer wait, Stoick said she was pleased with the way the new ticketing system worked overall.
‘It didn’t crash,’ she said. ‘I’m ecstatic about everything. The show will be great ‘- it’s going to be a full house.’
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