The aborted Thursday, February 22 pre-sale for The Arcade Fire’s May 27 performance at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in Portland, OR occurred only through an administrative error beyond the band’s control.  There has been some misdirection on this subject but, simply put, there should have been no pre-sale offered in advance of the general on-sale that was always scheduled for Saturday, February 24.  While Monqui Presents (one of the promoters of the show) did indeed authorize the Portland Center for the Performing Arts (PCPA) to run the pre-sale for its mailing list members, they had never even proposed such a pre-sale to the band or their representatives.  The band did not and would not have agreed to such a plan.  Any implication that the band or any of their representatives authorized the PCPA pre-sale and therefore should bear the blame for the resulting problems is absolutely false.

 
It is important to note that the band’s representatives had held 200 tickets back from sale on Saturday the 24^th in order to address the legitimate complaints of those pre-sale buyers who did not receive word of the cancellation of their purchases in time to buy again.  Had the PCPA agreed to the refund plan on Thursday, TicketMaster would have been able to inform everybody by Friday morning and those 200 tickets would have been sufficient to take care of the few who did not see the message in time.  Unfortunately, the PCPA argued against the proposed cancellation of the pre-sale for approximately 24 hours which prevented TicketMaster from completing their notifications until Saturday morning.  Instead of a few dozen people who would need access to those 200 held tickets, there were almost 300 in the end.

 
The band’s representatives have worked hard with the promoters (Monqui Presents and Jimi Biron at the Crystal Ballroom) over the last ten days to scrutinize the lists of buyers and creatively augment the number of tickets that could be made available for those people who either did not receive notification in time or did but were simply unable to purchase quickly enough on Saturday.  It was hoped there would be enough on hand to offer a pair to each person in that group but it soon became clear that would not be the case.  An alternate solution was devised.

 
It was decided that a new, private on-sale will be created in which the remaining tickets will be offered to that inconvenienced group of pre-sale buyers only.  Each buyer will have an individual code for the sale that cannot be shared with any other buyer.  All sales will be subject to a two-ticket maximum.  Some of the buyers in this group will not succeed in acquiring a pair of tickets before the supply is exhausted but they will be few in number.  This solution is not perfect but it is the absolute best one available following Monqui’s error and the PCPA’s delay.  All of the eligible buyers are being informed of this sale within the next 48 hours.

 
The band, their representatives and the promoters trust that the band’s fans will understand these unusual and regrettable circumstances as well as the band’s best intentions in light of them.  Thank you all for your support of The Arcade Fire.

Don't be alarmed by the Portland Pre-Sale mixup, this pre-sale is 100% authorized.

 The pre-sale starts Thursday, March 1s at 10am PST.

The link for the pre-sale is:

http://www.apeconcerts.com/

And there will be no password required.

 
Udate: there is another pre-sale (which i was not aware of) through Ticketmaster.com via Live 105 that does require a password, go here to sign up for the password.

http://live105.listenernetwork.com/