

Photo of Terminal 5 via pixbymaia's flickr

As you may recall, earlier this month LCD Soundsystem announced their final show, to be performed at MSG this April. When tickets went on sale, they sold out in seconds, and many landed on StubHub with shiny new inflated pricetags. There was outrage from both fans and James Murphy himself, and eventually four more shows were added, to be held at a smaller venue: Terminal 5 (tickets on sale tomorrow). But were those shows planned anyway? To the conspiracy board! Felix Salmon at Reuters investigates a theory that the MSG shows never, in fact, sold out.

"The conspiracy theory goes like this: LCD Soundsystem’s promoter, Bowery Presents, owns Terminal 5. By holding back most of the MSG tickets, secondary-market prices would be sure to skyrocket. The way that MSG is structured, the coveted general-admission area in front of the stage is actually pretty small, which means that it’s quite easy to generate a handful of headline-grabbing offers of tickets for sale at $10,000 apiece or more. If they wanted, LCD’s promoters could even put those offers up themselves, and then encourage the band to complain in public about the exorbitant prices. After getting everybody’s attention by artificially clamping down on the supply of MSG tickets, LCD’s promoters can then easily sell out four or more shows at their own venue, Terminal 5, which by coincidence just happened to be unbooked in the run-up to the MSG gig. Given all the buzz that this activity creates, the unsold MSG tickets can then be quietly disposed of on StubHub and other secondary-market sites."

Salmon notes that Bowery Presents knows exactly how many tickets were sold for the MSG show, but they're not releasing those numbers since it's in their interest that everyone believes 13,000 tickets sold out in seconds. We've contacted John Moore at Bowery Presents for a comment on this theory, and will update when we hear back... but we're told he's on vacation for another week, so don't hold your breath.