TELLURIDE BLUEGRASS LOTTERY 2/7–2/9

01 Feb TELLURIDE BLUEGRASS LOTTERY 2/7–2/9

After selling all 8,000 of the 4-day passes to the 39th Annual Telluride Bluegrass Festival (June 21-24) in just 18 days, Planet Bluegrass will be selling the remaining 1,500 single-day tickets exclusively via an online lottery for $65 each from February 7-9. Learn more about the lottery at telluridebluegrass.com/lottery-singleday or by calling 800-624-2422.

Planet Bluegrass has employed an online lottery for other high-demand tickets since 2007, including camping in Telluride’s Town Park and spaces in the RockyGrass Academy.  This will be the first online lottery for single-day tickets to any Planet Bluegrass festival.

Planet Bluegrass is adopting several new measures to restrict potential scalpers:
* Limit of 1 entry per credit card number or checking account
* Each entry may request no more than 2 tickets per day
* Tickets are non-refundable

The online lottery will be open from Tuesday, February 7 at 12:01am MST thru Thursday, February 9 at 11:59pm MST. Entries will be processed in a random order beginning on February 10.  Lottery forms may be submitted any time during the open period (Feb 7-9) with an equal chance of receiving tickets.

Single-day tickets will remain the same price as 2011: $65 per day. Lottery submissions must include a credit card or personal check. Payment will only be charged/deposited for tickets that can be filled.

Planet Bluegrass will announce the single-day lineup on the morning of February 6, the day before the lottery opens. The previously announced preliminary lineup includes: Alison Krauss & Union Station featuring Jerry Douglas, John Prine, k.d. lang & the Siss Boom Bang, Sam Bush Band, Yonder Mountain String Band, the Telluride House Band, and many more.

In prior years, single-day tickets have not been made available until March or April. Due to the excessive number of calls and emails requesting single-day tickets, Planet Bluegrass has moved this date.  As these single-day tickets are the last remaining tickets of any kind for the 2012 festival, Planet Bluegrass encourages festivarians to remind their festival families and spread the word widely.

In an effort to keep the festival off-the-radar of scalpers, Planet Bluegrass initially took a low-key approach to promoting tickets to the festival. Surrounding the initial on-sale day of December 7 there were no paid ads and no last-minute email blasts. But after two-thirds of the tickets were sold within a week, Planet Bluegrass reached out to all festivarians via email, social media, and newspapers / radio in Telluride (Telluride Daily Planet, Telluride Watch, KOTO) and beyond (Denver Post, etc).

After all of the 4-day passes for the 2012 Telluride Bluegrass Festival sold-out on December 25 (more than 3 months earlier than ever before), the demand for single-day tickets has been unprecedented. A technical analysis of the festival’s online ticketing site determined the site was not prepared to handle this level of demand. Selling these single-day tickets online would likely overwhelm the server, creating page-timeouts and other frustrations for festivarians looking to purchase tickets.