When fans buy tickets for Pearl Jam’s show in Chicago this summer–probably July 10, definitely at Soldier Field–they’ll be buying tickets through a unique computer system devised by southern California’s ETM Entertainment Network. The company says its massive automated system can handle an extraordinary 10,000 telephone calls simultaneously. Thus far, reports from the field are that the system works.
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“It went great,” reports Doug Kauffman, an independent promoter in Denver. “They sold 19,000 tickets in 13 minutes.” Kauffman’s Nobody in Particular Presents, a longtime Pearl Jam ally, is handling shows June 19 and 20 at Denver’s Red Rocks, the beautiful city-owned amphitheater in the Rocky Mountain foothills. A bedeviling problem in other cities–finding a suitable venue not tied up in an exclusive Ticketmaster contract–was made easy because Denver doesn’t make such agreements. By working with Kauffman’s company, the band was also thumbing its nose at powerful western promoter Barry Fey, who’s based in Denver.
Schniedermeier says the heart of ETM’s appeal is its computer system. Where Ticketmaster hires a corps of often unenthusiastic phone jockeys to handle the barrage of calls when a concert goes on sale, ETM’s system is a voice-prompted interactive one. For Pearl Jam, ETM is using an 800 number, and the calls are routed to the company’s southern California computer. Schniedermeier says it should take customers an average of four minutes to select the show and seats and plug in their credit card number and address; tickets are then mailed out.
