My rant against U2.com.
I'd just like to take this chance to voice my absolute displeasure with U2.com. At the time of this update, not only has a second concert in Buenos Aires been announced, but tickets have gone on sale - and if you read U2.com, you wouldn't even know this concert is going to happen. The people running the band's own official website seem to have forgotten that their job is actually to report on U2 and what U2's doing, such as tour dates!
This year really has been filled with countless examples of U2.com's incompetence and ineptitude, and I've frankly had enough of it. I cannot believe that while I am able to post an accurate setlist complete with snippets to U2-Vertigo-Tour.com within five minutes of the show's conclusion, the band's official site, when they finally post the set themselves, spell song names wrong ("Running to Standstill"), use incorrect and inconsistent grammar ("Pride in the name of love"), post inaccurate trivia (such as claiming The First Time was played in 1993), and make mistakes with the setlist itself! It's bad enough for them to post setlists that omit songs played or include songs not played (such as claiming Stuck In A Moment and All Because Of You were played at the final third leg show when THEY WEREN'T), but the worst example of their incompetence comes from the 10th of July show in Paris when U2.com's article centred on Bad, claiming that "it's always a special occasion when Bad is played" and that night was such an occasion ... even though U2 did not play Bad that night (in fact, they played Bad in Europe just once, in Dublin two weeks before the Paris shows). It's one thing to post a set containing songs that weren't played, but it's even worse to centre an entire article around making fanfare about a song the band did not perform.
I wish U2.com's incompetence was confined to setlists. I could then at least remind myself that your average person isn't nearly as concerned with setlists as I am. But of course, there was the presale fiasco that can't be ignored, the membership cards that many people never received, the insulting and pathetic U2 Communication disc, and just simply NOT announcing that a concert is happening. I was frustrated that the Australian and New Zealand presale was announced a mere day before it began, and I was unimpressed that Argentinian ticket details for the first Buenos Aires concert weren't announced until the day of the sale, but there was still the counter-argument available of "what if the details weren't made public until then and U2.com just reported it as soon as they could?" In this case, however, there's no excuse. The information is out there from the promoter, but U2.com has remained silent. Maybe they're on Christmas break? Well, look, all the major fan sites have managed to stay updated, the promoters have had enough staff active to make their announcement, Ticketek has had enough staff to put the tickets on sale, and I'm sure a lone U2.com staffer has five minutes to spare a couple of days after Christmas to write a brief article for the site stating that "a show has been announced for this venue on that day, tickets will cost $x for seats here and $y for seats there, so go get them at this link". Or maybe they're all just baboons who got a trainload of bananas for Christmas and haven't finished feasting yet.
A band of U2's calibre deserves far better and more competent online representation than this. In fact, no band deserves an inaccurate official website. What a disgrace.
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axver) wrote,
frustrated
