Monthly Archives: December 2012

Dec 15 2012

Merry Christmas: Tickets are $650. And you can scalp them.

The Jackedrabbit has spoken once more, bringing glad tidings of tickets. Were Burners naughty or nice? Did they get what they wanted for Christmas from the BMOrg – ie. tickets linked to IDs and no more lottery? Read on…

money bags desert islandwe don’t know yet what Black Rock City’s allowable peak population for 2013 will be. Some of the details of agreements that impact that number have not yet been finalized, which means we don’t have enough data to determine precisely how many tickets will be sold and at what price. We are working hard to get our permits and agreements in place, and will be announcing the full ticket plan on Friday January 4, 2013.

Hmmm…”full ticket plan”. Do they mean “pricing tiers”? What more do they have in store for us?

We know you’re super curious about some big questions, and we’d like to put your mind at ease about a few things right now: tickets will be sold first-come first-served — that’s right, no lottery.

woo-hoo!

Secondly, purchasing tickets will require pre-registration so that we can weed out known scalpers beforehand. We’ll offer a robust Low Income Ticket Program, as we have in the past, and we’re bringing back the Secure Ticket Exchange Program (STEP) to facilitate the safe, hassle-free exchange of tickets between people in the aftermarket.

So STEP comes back, giving BMOrg an additional royalty-type revenue stream from secondary market sales; and poor people still get a look in. “Pre-registration” sounded a bit like linking tickets to IDs to me, but no…

We will not be implementing identity-based ticketing (e.g. name-on-ticket) … for more information, see this blog post from Larry Harvey: http://blog.burningman.com/?p=23887.

What they really mean by pre-registration is “we are still having a process where you have to register to be eligible to buy tickets”. Very unfortunately similar to the ticket lottery system. And, like last year where a bunch of insiders had a chance to buy “early release” tickets for $420, then sell them for 100%+ profits on the secondary market, we’re having another “early bird” sale. The price this time? A whopping $650. Get ready for a major ticket price hike across the board in 2013.

early birdEarly-birds can participate in our Holiday Sale, which allows folks to buy tickets in time for holiday gifting. PLEASE NOTE: Holiday Sale tickets are priced dramatically higher than our regular tickets will be and Black Rock City, LLC will donate 3% of the price of each ticket sold during this early Holiday Sale to the Burning Man Project, a new nonprofit dedicated to spreading Burning Man culture around the world. (In addition, Black Rock City, LLC makes other substantial contributions throughout the year to support the Burning Man Project, including contributing the proceeds from fundraising events and many other forms of support.)

So … here are the details:

– 3000 tickets will be offered at $650 each for the Holiday Sale.
– In order to participate in this sale, you must pre-register at:
http://tickets.burningman.com/registration-holiday2013.html
– Registration is open NOW and will close at noon PST on Wednesday December 19th.
– Those pre-registered will be able to participate in the first-come first-served sale on Thursday December 20th, starting at noon PST.
– You may purchase a maximum of 4 tickets per person.
– These tickets are not eligible for STEP, but are transferable (you are welcome to resell them on your own, if you wish).
– The only payment types accepted are Mastercard or Visa credit cards, or debit cards with either the Visa or Mastercard symbols. If you don’t have one of these cards, you will need to obtain a one-time use card.
– Physical tickets will be shipped between June 1 and July 15, unless you opt for pick-up at Will Call in Black Rock City.

Black Rock City, LLC is donating 3% of these tickets to the Burning Man Project? Sounds like a nice tax write-off for them. And the left hand is so generous that it provides even more tax-deductible “substantial contributions” to the right hand, from off-Playa fundraising activities during the year. “You can feel good about paying us this $650, because we’re giving $20 of it to another company we control”. But wasn’t the Burning Man Project supposed to be taking over all of the revenues and operations?

Dec 15 2012

Oh Look! We Forgot to Count this $1.3 million

Just when we thought we could say goodbye once and for all to 2012 and all it’s ticket shenanigans, we get another classic case of number-fudging from BMOrg. You know how attendance was down on last year, despite the population cap increase? Well, it seems that a few thousand votes people mysteriously disappeared from the official tally. A “just in case” number, perhaps? At 3,764, it’s suspiciously close in size to the 3,963 difference in 2011 between the 50,000 official permit and the reported over-population. No big deal – just $1, 317, 400 of tickets, at the $350 price. “Oh sorry, we forgot about this million dollars over here”.

Here’s BMOrg:

cant countWhen the peak population for Black Rock City 2012 was announced at noon on Friday of the event, the preliminary tally was 52,385, which seemed a bit low. We suspected there were more people in Black Rock City at its peak (which was actually Friday at 6am this year, by the way). So after the event, we went back and conducted a full and comprehensive audit …

After doing some pretty significant accounting and recounting, we determined that the actual peak population at the 2012 event was in fact 56,149. (Now, that’s not everybody who went to Burning Man, it’s just the peak population … a lot of people came late and/or left early this year, having planned ahead to avoid high-traffic ingress and egress times — did you notice the shorter wait times?)

Due to some new processes that were put in place in 2012, the count released on playa was low.  For fifteen years we’ve had a great record of recording accurate population tallies, and we place a high premium on capturing and reporting this important data.  We keep count because a) it’s really important for us to know how many people are out there (for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is production planning), and b) it’s required by our BLM permit requirement, as you’ve probably heard by now. Our population cap for 2012 was 60,900, and happily our peak population didn’t come close to bumping up against that total.

So there you are … we’re happy to be able to report the final population count for 2012 … and we’re glad we’ve worked out some kinks in our system to ensure proper reporting in the future.

Just like an episode of South Park, every fuck-up from BMOrg ends with a “we’ve learned our lesson, everything’s fine, and it will all be better in the future”. No explanation of how the fuck someone miscounted 4000 people, or what they’ve done now to fix it. No acknowledgement that last year, they screwed up their count so much that they put the entire event in jeopardy. Just, “we’ve done pretty significant accounting”. Yes, so did Enron.

 

Dec 15 2012

Opulent Temple 10 Year Anniversary – BM 2012

syd gris 2012Thanks to San Francisco electronic music master Syd Gris for sharing this one with us. Great video. OT will be missed in 2013.