PTBM

Phish tickets by mail.  A simple concept.  There are tickets to see Phish, and you can order them through the mail.  This sure beats standing in line at the outlets on the day of sale or at the venue the day of show.  Or at least it used to be, until Al Gore invented the internet.  Now, PTBM, which is pretty much just an online order that gets put into a hat and randomly* selected by MusicToday.  The laborious process of old meant that the only people putting in for PTBM tickets were fans and had intentions to go to those shows.  Of course people would put in for a few extra, hoping to trade them or possible extend their tour, but overall, I surmise that that lottery was mostly comprised of fans.

Enter today. where most fans entering the ticket lottery ask friends, family, and coworkers to enter the lottery along with them to increase their chances.  This is a ridiculous situation.  Imagine in the beginning, when the first few people enlisted help.  Of course they got more tickets because they had more entries.  But as this became the norm, we are back to the same situation in the beginning, where our chances are about the same, but instead we need to put in a half dozen orders to compete.  You're not actually increasing your chances by having your friends enter also, instead you're just fighting to keep up with all of the the other fans that are trying to screw you.

So in the end, our chances don't really change.  Instead, all we are doing is being more stressed out and spending more time on trying to get tickets to see these four guys play some instruments.  All that is accomplished by the internet ticket lottery is to turn the Phish community into a rat race like everything else in this world.  For those who come to the shows to get away from such everyday things, the new and improved PTBM is not apart of the plan.