Nine Inch Nails' In-Person Ticket Policy is Beautiful

Nine Inch Nails has announced a U.S. tour, with tickets available Saturday, May 19 — and buyers can only buy tickets in person, at the box office.

I repeat: In person. At the box office. In 2018.

This is a beautiful thing.

Everyone knows that buying tickets for shows these days is a demonizing experience. You stare at your laptop’s clock that says “9:59 AM,” you hit refresh on your browser right at 10am, you scramble to fill out a byzantine obstacle course of captchas and pull-down menus and verifiers, and then, you get booted off the server, or your tickets — with a 40% markup of “convenience” fees and “facility” fees — become suddenly “no longer available,” or, since 750,000 scalpers and bots are trying to buy tickets the same time as you, they never even come up as available in the first place.

You go to Stubhub, where there’s 300 tickets for the show that just went on sale three minutes ago, and they’re all priced four or five times higher than face value.

This is unquestionably a broken system, and no one seems to be willing to do anything about it. Enter Trent Reznor, who clearly looked at a simpler, more equitable, more social way of selling tickets from the Pretty Hate Machine era of the early 1990s, and said, “Huh. That was better. Let’s try it.”

Nine Inch Nails play the Bill Graham Civic Center in San Francisco on Dec. 3. That’s also where, on May 19, you’ll find a line of people wrapped around the block, talking with each other and enjoying the morning and not paying through the nose to a giant corporate-mergered behemoth.

Read Nine Inch Nails’ statement about their ticket policy below.