Thousands of Radiohead fans were disappointed yesterday when a glitch with Ticketmaster’s system caused them to lose coveted tickets to the band’s upcoming shows at the Roseland Ballroom in New York City. While it’s no surprise that Radiohead’s first show in New York in years would sell out quickly, problems with the ticket sales raise troubling questions about how far fans – and artists – can trust Ticketmaster.

At Radiohead’s request, tickets to the Roseland shows are non-transferrable, Will-Call only. Yet hundreds of Radiohead fans took to Twitter yesterday to report tickets for sale online, often retailing for hundreds of dollars above face value. Some of those tickets may have appeared on Ticketmaster’s own Tickets Now exchange before the public onsale at 10am Monday. Ticketmaster denied this, but it wouldn’t be the first time they were caught improperly reselling tickets above face value.

In response to Monday’s fiasco, Ticketmaster is claiming that the problems fans encountered are evidence that the industry needs to convert to a restrictive, paperless ticketing system. We see things differently.

The problem with the Radiohead onsale was not ticket transferability or the volume of ticket requests. It was the utter lack of transparency — both in Ticketmaster’s own checkout process, and in today’s ticketing industry more broadly. Fans were frustrated that tickets in their shopping cart one moment were gone the next. And that people who were on Ticketmaster later in the morning scored tickets, while others on the site earlier were denied.

Add in the growing practice of VIP tickets and artist holdbacks (see: Katy Perry), not to mention Ticketmaster’s own shady history, and we’ve got an environment where it’s impossible for fans to really know how many tickets are available to a given show, and whether a lack of ticket availability is genuine, or merely the result of someone else gaming the system. It’s easy to see why frustrations boiled over so quickly.

In light of this week’s events, here are the questions that Ticketmaster needs to answer in order for there to be a clear and fair accounting of what actually happened during the onsale:

  • Can Ticketmaster guarantee that Radiohead tickets offered for sale on TicketsNow before the initial onsale to the public were in fact fraudulent, and not the result of artist or venue hold backs?
  • Where there any artist, venue, promoter or other hold backs of Radiohead tickets? If so, will they reveal who received them?
  • Were fans who were lucky enough to acquire tickets allowed to resell those tickets using TicketsNow and will those resales be honored at the gate?
  • If so, were fans using a different secondary market, like Craig’s List, also allowed to resell their tickets?

We hope the media will hold Ticketmaster accountable for providing these answers. And if they don’t, we encourage frustrated Radiohead fans take the issue directly to the band, who have more leverage to get straight answers out of a conglomerate like Ticketmaster. The fans deserve no less.