The biggest ever concert organized in Finland will be Madonna's Sticky & Sweet in Helsinki on August 6, 2009. The venue is actually the port area that for the summer is unused after the port for goods moved to eastern Helsinki this winter and the area's rebuilding won't start until later. 17 hectares surrounded, obviously, by the sea and 80.000 people. Only Lordi has gathered together as many people in Helsinki's center after their Eurovision win but that was free and not a real concert. Anyways, that was a very small link to Eurovision but I just wanted to write about this as the ticket sales was a total madness. If the Eurovision 2007 tickets sold fast (17 minutes for the final) and was rather chaotic at least it worked. Today everything went wrong. The Finnish GSM was working overtime and over 500.000 calls were made and the ticket office counted over 600.000 attempts to get into the website. The lines were long in every ticket office and other selling points, a total of 800 places around Finland. The ticket machines jammed everywhere, the lines were busy, the internet dead. And yet, somehow all the tickets disappeared before noon only to reappear on eBay and such for minimum 285 euros (they costed max 119 euros) Where I was in line, before 9am when the selling started the line was maybe 100 meters long. I was maybe buying #30 in line. Right after 9am 2-3 buyers got tickets, then it stopped. Again around 10.15 two more lucky ones got tickets from the precious machine. People were busy trying to call the sell lines without luck. Later we discovered the telephone company made a real mess and people were connected to other buyers instead of sellers if there eventually was an answer instead of a dead line. Around 11.15 the selling people at the desk finally said there are still tickets but they are unable to sell and print them so go to internet.... So, long story short: after standing in line, cold and tired, thirsty and hungry, frustrated and upset I didn't get tickets. Life sucks. Big time.Update: There were 4.000 A-category tickets and 10.000 B-category tickets that sold out apparently in 4 minutes. I am still asking how and to whom? The tickets office claims now everything went okeyish and the system didn't crash??!! Ok... Remains the fact the concert is sold out. I still wonder how...
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