Phish Tickets By Mail

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Phish Tickets By Mail (or PTBM) was a service that sold tickets to performances by the jam band Phish, before their general on-sale date through Ticketmaster and other traditional ticketing outlets. The service exists today in a limited form for concerts involving Trey Anastasio, Mike Gordon, Page McConnell and Jon Fishman.

[edit] Mail order

For most of Phish's existence, the Phish ticket presale was done through mail order. For each Phish tour, specific instructions for mail order were listed in the band's newsletter, "Doniac Schvice" (and, later, Phish.com), usually involving envelopes of a specified size, postcards and return postage in the event the ticket order was not fulfilled. There were very specific details that needed to be done, in an effort to deter scalpers and ticket brokers. The ticket orders were then outsourced to a Vermont business to fulfill the orders. In the final years of the mail order process, ticket orders were processed by the staff at the Flynn Theatre in Burlington, Vermont. A random lottery determined the order in which ticket requests were fulfilled, and no seniority or special treatment was given to any fan.

[edit] Online order

In 2001, while Phish was on a hiatus, Trey Anastasio booked a tour of amphitheatres and major venues. It was his largest tour, at the time, without Phish. With Phish's management, Dionysian Productions scaled down during the hiatus, Anastasio and Dionysian used an internet-based ticket presale service run by Musictoday, who has been running a similar service for Dave Matthews Band's Warehouse Fan Association since 1999. Instead of fans filling out postcards, they went to a website, requested shows and put in credit card information. For this tour, the orders were still processed in Vermont at the Flynn Theatre. This would be the last tour where PTBM would run from Vermont.

When Trey Anastasio went on tour in 2002, he used the Musictoday service again. However, unlike the 2001 tour, the final processing process took place at Musictoday's home base in Charlottesville, Virginia. Later that year, when Phish announced their return tour, PTBM used that service as well. All ticket presales for Phish and side projects, from that point on, used Musictoday's online service.

[edit] Real-time order fulfillment

As Phish side project tours have become smaller following Phish's 2004 disbandment, most presales have been real time sales, with a first-come-first-served approach in place of the lotteries employed in Phish's touring heyday.