Watch above: The demand to buy Folk Fest tickets was so high Saturday, the festival’s website crashed.
UPDATE: As of Wednesday, June 18 – All weekend passes and all individual day passes for adults and youth to the 2014 Edmonton Folk Music Festival are sold out. There are still tickets available for seniors. There have been some changes to the lineup and schedules. For details, click here.
EDMONTON – Hundreds of people lined up at Telus Field bright and early Saturday morning in hopes of snapping up tickets to the Edmonton Folk Music Festival. Those purchasing tickets online hit a bit of a roadblock, though, when the festival’s website crashed Saturday afternoon.
Just over 1,000 people were able to purchase tickets to the festival in person at Telus Field, after winning a lottery – the festival’s way of fairly distributing tickets.
At 2 p.m., the rest of the tickets were made available for purchase online via the Edmonton Folk Festival website and Ticketmaster. However, sometime before 3 p.m. the Folk Festival’s website crashed, due to the sheer volume of people hoping to get their hands on tickets to the highly-popular event.
“There’s worse things than, you know, your site crashing because you’ve got too much demand for tickets,” said festival producer Terry Wickham. “I always say there’s one thing worse than a sell out and that’s when no one shows up. That’s a lot worse.”
The tickets held by the Folk Fest were transferred to Ticketmaster to go on sale at 4 p.m.
The festival announced its highly-anticipated lineup at the end of May. Ben Harper, Blue Rodeo, James Vincent McMorrow, Michael Franti, Dan Mangan, Vance Joy, Los Lobos and many others will hit the stage in Gallagher Park August 7th to 10th.
You can see the Folk Fest schedule here.
Of course, there was no shortage of reaction to the lineup on social media:
“I know when the festival gets to be this size, people can have expectations that we’re going to be everything to everybody musically — we’re not,” said Wickham.
“We look first and foremost: ‘are they a folk artist?’ Second question we ask is: ‘how good are they?’ Not how much they cost.
“You know, a million dollars goes a long way with folk music and that’s what we’ve spent — that and a bit more.”
You can see some of the ticket prices for adults (aged 18-64) below:
Personal Pass: $169
4-Day Transferable: $199
Thursday or Friday evening: $57
Saturday or Sunday full day: $67
Seniors over 80 can still attend for free.
Up to half of the 11,000 four-day passes were allotted for in-person purchase at Telus Field. The rest are up for grabs online through Ticketmaster.
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