See more photos from Kraftwerk's weekend sets.
Kraftwerk
Museum of Modern Art
Saturday, April 14

Better than: The ShowClix waiting room.

There was a roar that went up during the full stops between songs early in Kraftwerk's Saturday-night MoMA set, the fifth of eight total (the seventh begins tonight). It started like applause but kept rising, thickening—there was no mistaking it. It wasn't simple relief that we finally got into the damn building after the concert series' well-publicized online ticket-sales flubs, or that (I hope) we didn't have to pay $45,000 for one. It was more like gratitude, as if we were getting to shake hands with Thomas Edison: Thank you for inventing everything. OK, maybe not "everything," but like James Brown or the Beatles or Bob Dylan, Kraftwerk's impact is simply too big to measure.

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Kraftwerk fever might have ruffled many of you the prickly way, what with the Great Unobtainable Online Tickets Ruse blighting the band's series of eight chronological album-by-album shows at MoMA this week. But let's look on the bright side! Over the years the Dusseldorf dance merchants have churned out an exquisite sequence of moody electronic tracks, and done so in a manner that's influenced great chunks of the rap and electro scenes. Here's a look at seven fantastic samples from the vault of the 'Werk.

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Free Kitten[esque].

Krautwork 1-8 Condensed: Kraftwerk Covered
Littlefield
Tuesday, April 10

Better than: Waiting in the queue.

"Intellectual property" is the hot Hollywood buzzword this season for content with which potential audiences might have some previous and preciously guileless associations—enough to want to shill out $12.50 to see, say, a movie based on the otherwise plotless board game Battleship. While tribute bands have long been big business pretty much everywhere, it's likewise nearly impossible to go a week in New York without some kind of star-studded tribute, from Michael Dorf's big-budget epics (including his Hot Rocks at Carnegie Hall last month) to more personalized affairs (The Shaggs themselves are attending this coming weekend's show at Rock Shop). And Kraftwerk is some hot IP right now, enough to fill a 250-or-so capacity room on a Tuesday night in Brooklyn, while the (arguably) real deal plays the first of eight sold-out nights at MoMA.

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Kraftwerk

In case you're still steaming about the debacle that was the botched on-sale of tickets for Kraftwerk's eight April shows at MoMA—or just wondering where all the tickets to those shows could have gone, since nobody you know got them—Volkswagen has some news for you. It's giving away 50 pairs of tickets a night (so 100 tickets a show) to people who will help the car company virally market itself by transforming them into animated GIFs! Insert your own "Computer World" gag here.

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The CEO of Showclix—the ticketing company that handled yesterday's ticketing process for the Museum of Modern Art's eight-night series of Kraftwerk shows, during which quite a few people got stuck in waiting rooms and took to Twitter to describe their sell-out-rage in detail—has posted an open letter to those people who feel they were let down by his company. "Ultimately, we failed many of you," wrote Joshua Dziabiak, who while noting that there were no actual outages also said that one of the company's queuing servers "bubbled-up under the heavy load and caused frequent timeouts."

It's worth pointing out that, according to the letter, tickets to the eight shows sold out in approximately one hour; in the era of large venues being sold out in minutes thanks to people bum-rushing Ticketmaster.com, that timespan seems almost camp-out-at-Tower-era slow—especially for a series of shows that could only sell tickets to "approximately 1.20%" of the "tens and tens of thousands of people" exasperatedly tweeting and hitting refresh. The full text below.

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via TonsofTickets.com

Apparently some scalpers out there didn't get stuck in the ShowClix waiting room and got through to get Kraftwerk tickets... and now the $25-a-pop passes have been marked way, way up. Ah, capitalism. You do have to wonder just what, exactly, the $6,750 in "service fees" might be going, though... [via ILX / Previously]

Kraftwerk

The machines will always get you in the end.

In an effort to "keep up," I follow a lot of New York-based music fans on Twitter. Which means that whenever tickets go on sale for an important show, whether at a venue large or small—Pulp at Radio City Music Hall, LCD Soundsystem at MSG, today's release of tickets for April's series of Kraftwerk shows at the Museum of Modern Art—I hear a pronounced hue and cry from those people who were sold out of the shows for whatever reason, be it an inconveniently scheduled meeting, a browser failure, or a third-party ticketing site that just couldn't handle the onslaught of requests from ravenous fans. Having studied this phenomenon up close (too close!) for months now, and in anticipation of a lot of people being shut out of those Kraftwerk shows, I present a tweaked version of the Kübler-Ross model—the five stages of grief one experiences when, despite having top-flight technology and disposable income (and maybe even connections), one gets sold out of a show s/he really, really wanted to attend. Clip it out, save it for later, pass it to your friends who are going on Tweet rampages.

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