This morning, Austin City Limits Festival Early Bird passes—discounted tickets for next year’s fest available to users signed up on the ACL website—sold out in just under 45 minutes. Coming in at $165 rather than $185, they were a decent deal if you’re planning on going to ACL 2011 no matter what the line-up, but they’re not half the deal that was open to the public last week.
 
Tickets to Austin City Limits are not cheap. That’s not to say that there’s no value in them, but they’re not exactly an affordable way to spend a weekend. That’s why we were excited to try our luck at landing $50 tickets to the festival last week.
 
For the second year in a row, ACL offered up a small* batch of Souvenir Passes for $50. Unlike the Early Bird Passes, these don’t go to loyal ACL attendees—after all, if they’ve already shown a willingness to drop $185 on passes, why give them $50 tickets—but rather the mouth-breathing, ticket-scalping general public.
 
*The exact quantity of these limited number of tickets is unknown and ACL and Frontgate don’t seem too eager to release it. 

Like most hot items released online at a set time, even if you’re in the know, getting these tickets involves a fair share of browser-refreshing luck to push through the online clusterfuck and land on the purchase page. Frontgate Tickets attempted to manage the mess by offering a digital queue, though many were left waiting in line long after the tickets were sold, afraid to navigate away from the page for fear of losing their chance at passes.

The point in time at which these tickets would be sold was announced via Twitter from ACL to their 25,000 followers on Wednesday, Oct. 13.

This cryptic message didn’t require Columbo-like detective skills to crack—a simple Google search of Giles, Giles and Fripp would reveal one of their biggest hits was a song called Thursday Morning—but things got interesting when people turned to our generation’s go-to source of information, Wikipedia. Several creative edits from curmudgeonly would-be $50 pass purchasers made that clue a bit harder to solve.

The original Wiki reference:

… was changed dozens of times after the announcement, in the hopes of throwing prospective ticketbuyers off track. Here are some of the highlights (click for full size):