New Year's Resolutions & eplus

By Liza

Last year, I made a New Year's resolution I had no trouble keeping!

It was simple -- go to at least one gig a month, be it a major international act, bratty teenage garage band or a non-routine DJ set. And I succeeded in my mission!

I felt good about this because I missed my days of living for shows, before I moved to Tokyo. In my native Florida, gigs are super cheap and start well after work. Plus, there's no language barrier keeping me from discovering new acts (unless you count Spanish!)

However, in Tokyo I found myself working too late for the early-starting shows, and too broke after drinking away my hard-earned yen while lamenting my glorious rock and roll days.

No more! With the help of this site (and a job change!) I'm back on track. Learning a bit of Japanese has also helped, and I discovered the glory of pre-ordering tickets.

As dorky as it feels to buy gig tickets often months in advance (like I did with the Pavement reunion show in April!) it's much better to know I have my tickets to see the bigger international acts and don't have to scramble to a ticket machine on a weekend morning.

Here's a little info on how to use the eplus presale system. You'll need to have a bit of Japanese ability but with the help of a friend or Google translate it's not too difficult.

1. Open up an account with your e-mail address. (it's free)
--Click the "はじめての方" button next to the "Top" button near the top of the screen.
--Scroll down to "会員登録" button on the bottom left and click.
--Hit the yellow button to agree to the terms of service.
--Enter your info. You can pick how you want to pay for tickets. I had trouble getting it to accept my (American) credit card, so I selected the option to pay for and pick up tickets at FamilyMart. (more later)

2. Find the show you want to see. The search bar at the top left of the screen will search by artist, and I find that the names of most foreign artists are in English, not katakana.

3. It will list all the shows for that artist in Japan. Click the yellow button to pick the one you want.

4. Here's the page for an upcoming show of the very excellent Shibusashirazu Orchestra (渋さ知らズオーケストラ). You can see the venue (with venue info button underneath) , then the date, then the info we want: the pre-order period ("プレオーダー" is the magic word), and then the public on-sale date. Looks like this show is available for pre-order Jan. 22-28, and general on-sale from Feb. 13.

5. Now here's where you'll have to take my word on things. Click the yellow button to select this show. You'll only have the option to do the pre-order during the designated period, exactly at the times listed.

6. Click the button to say you want to pre-order, and you'll be prompted to log in (if you haven't already, sometimes it asks you earlier!) Log in, enter the number of tickets you want and confirm.
-- What you're doing now is entering a lottery for a set number of pre-order tickets. You'll get an e-mail confirming this -- make sure you get the e-mail or you haven't entered!
--The e-mail will tell you when you can check the site back to find out if you got the tickets.
--There's a fee of probably 210 yen a ticket when you do the pre-order, along with some "service" fee.

7. You'll get another e-mail telling you if you got the tickets, or you can log back in to eplus at the customer page to see the status of your application. ("会員の方" button at top menu bar, then the ">>申込み状況照会" option.)

8. Pick the show, and you'll see the price info. You'll also get a date when the money is due, if you're paying at FamilyMart like I did. Here's the tricky part: you'll need to click on the bigger yellow button at the end of the show info, and this should go to another screen showing the name of your chosen payment convini chain. Click the yellow button next to it.

9. I recommend printing out this next screen. You will need to enter this number in the convini ticket machine in order to pay for the show. The bottom of it shows the screens to touch on the machine in order to get to your personal payment screen -- you can't just enter the number in the regular ticket lookup number section. The convini clerk can help you.

10. Pay for the show at the convini. The clerk will give you a receipt, but you probably can't print out the tickets just yet -- it seems like you have to wait until the general on-sale to print them out.

11. Bring your magic number back to the convini after the date you're told and you can get a slip for printing out your presale tickets. Don't worry if you lose the printout with your number on it; you can always go back to eplus and access your number.

12. Enjoy your show in like, 6 months' time!

Way uncool I know but better than stressing out the morning the tickets go on-sale! I've seen bigger international acts sell out small venues (like Liquid Room in Ebisu) in a couple of hours.

I hope this info has been helpful! Does anyone else have any gig-related resolutions?