When talk of summer music festivals begins, Chicago’s Lollapalooza will come up in conversation more often than not. And what’s not to look forward to? Major artists and bands travel to Grant Park to perform for three full days in August – this year, the dates are Friday, August 1 through Sunday, August 3.
Rumors of the lineup began in early spring, creating a buzz of excitement over the internet. Ticket sale dates were announced just days prior to being available for purchasing, and concert-goers across the country and around the world scheduled their days around the time that the passes went on sale.
Unlike most music festivals, Lollapalooza tickets sell out in just minutes. It is crucial to be on the website at the time they are released, and even that does not guarantee a spot in the wild crowds of the festival. According to chicagobusiness.com, Lollapalooza sold 100,000 tickets for each day of the festival — a total of 300,000.
Three-day passes went on sale on Tuesday, March 25 at 10:00 a.m. Early bird passes, which were $225 instead of the normal $250, sold out in under ten minutes, according to redeyechicago.com. The rest of the three days were sold out before the clock reached 11:15 a.m. The following day, March 26, individual one-day passes went on sale for $100 each, and Friday and Saturday passes were sold out before 11 a.m.
Purchasers of the passes were all placed on a standby page on the Lollapalooza website, which meant they would be randomly selected to purchase passes – but the clock was ticking while credit card information was being entered, and sometimes the customers would run out of time before the purchase went through, a very frustrating ordeal. Senior Kevin Hays had a rough time getting his three days.
“We got put on the standby list for such a long time…some foul language was used due to the high pressure situation to get our three-day passes. After a while, we were directed to the ticket purchase page, and there was much rejoicing,” Hays said.
Due to the mass amounts of people attempting to buy tickets, the Lollapalooza website crashed a number of times – leaving its customers even more unhappy.
“I was online at exactly 10:00 a.m., and the website kept saying that there was an error. It was really frustrating because I felt like thousands of passes were being sold in the time that the site wasn’t working for me,” said senior Maren Dziedzic, who did end up getting three day passes.
Lollapalooza is extremely popular at LHS; Twitter was full of anxious tweets on the morning of March 25. As the years go on, its popularity grows amongst students. Some people get hotels to stay at over the course of the three days, and others take the train to and from the festival each morning and night. The festival itself goes from 11:00 a.m. until 10:00 PM.
