Jay Reatard/Deerhunter Split 7″ Preorder

a: Jay Reatard – Florescent Grey (Deerhunter cover)
b: Deerhunter – Oh, It’s Such a Shame (Reatard cover)

So, if you are obsessive as me, you just spent the last 20+ minutes trying to pre-order the fourth single from Matador’s ever decreasing Jay Reatard singles-sweepstakes. The masses were waiting at the gate to grab one of these after the last single sold out almost immediately (and if you pay any attention to eBay, most of them went up for auction), hammering Matadors checkout cart, and generally pissing everyone off in the process. I got one (or so I think – who knows how many orders were processed before me), but this whole process makes me feel dirty. Think Cabbage Patch kids in the 1980’s; think sports cards in the early 1990’s; think Beanie Babies at McDonalds…

UPDATE: This is from Matador:

To Everyone That Ordered Today,
To start off with, we are deeply sorry about how messed up everything got with the Jay Reatard pre-order. There were a number of frustrations and mess-ups along the way that made ordering this record insanely difficult. It initially got put up too early, and those that ordered it early ended up not being able to re-order during the regular time. The first orders were deleted, but their cancellation wasn’t processed in time. Coupled with the slow server speed, a lot of people who signed in very early ended up empty handed.

To make up for this, and make it fair for all of the people that want to order the record we are going to re-start pre-order Tomorrow, 7/15 at 3PM ET. All orders from today are getting cancelled. I know it’s even more annoying to go through all of this again but we will work incredibly hard to ensure that there is more room on the server to accommodate traffic, and make sure that we don’t have any more “FRAUD” notifications for people that already ordered.

Once again, we’re going to do pre-order again Tomorrow, 7/15, at 3PM ET at matadorrecords.com/store

I’m very sorry about this and sincerely hope that we can regain your trust.

So fucking stupid.

Update: Looks like Matador is doing the right thing here:

As many of you are aware, the preorder process for Jay Reatard 7″ #4 turned into a nightmare for you and for us. First, on Monday, the preorder accidentally went live at 1:30 PM, 90 minutes earlier than was announced. Early orders poured in, and since this seemed unfair to those who were waiting until 3:00 PM to order, we cancelled those orders and started the process again at 3. However, due to a rule at our credit-card processing company that we had never had reason to encounter before, anyone who ordered for a second time on the same card got a duplicate/fraud message, and were not allowed to complete the order. In addition, the rush of orders at 3 was so intense that the server slowed down to a crawl, and many people were not able to complete their orders at all.

In light of all this we decided to redo the order at 3 PM on Tuesday. We cancelled all orders for a second time, got with our credit card processing company to shorten the timeout period for duplicate orders, and got with our ISP to prepare for an onslaught of traffic at 3.

However we were not prepared for the amount of traffic we did get yesterday – over 10,000 unique visitors at 3 PM, and the server once again slowed to a crawl or worse, leaving many people out in the cold, disgusted, and fed up with Matador – understandably. (For comparison’s sake, the entire Matador website usually gets 8,000 unique visitors per day.) We’re still not clear whether the publicity resulting from the previous two preorders led to the increase in visitors, or whether this was some kind of denial of service attack from a disgruntled customer.

In any event, we have collated orders from everyone who ordered successfully the first OR second time with those who ordered successfully the third time, and we are filling orders for everyone who got a successful order confirmation from us, whether it was cancelled or not.

We’d like to offer apologies for all the drama and hassle, but we’ve been apologizing non-stop and that’s not what you guys want – you want an efficient order process, and that’s what we pledge to offer in the future. It’s going to be even harder to buy singles #5 and #6 – that’s the whole point of this exercise after all – but it won’t be due to technical problems. We’ll have security, traffic, credit card processing and everything else sorted out and tested well in advance of the remaining 7″ preorders, and it will work the way it’s supposed to. I think that’s all we can say at this time.

Matador Records