Goldstar

» see goldstar.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Goldstar launched on 14 February 2002, which in Los Angeles is a sensible day to start selling theater tickets. I spent that same winter in internet cafes in Turkey, and a service whose entire job was filling the empty seats at a Tuesday night regional ballet would have been incomprehensible to me then. The live entertainment economy it depended on is a specifically American piece of infrastructure, and it was never going to export.

The trade itself is older than the web. A theater with unsold seats on a weeknight loses the full value of those seats the moment the lights go down, so selling them at half price captures something instead of nothing, and it fills the room, which matters to the performers and to the bar. Goldstar put that arrangement online for the acts too small to run their own discount operation, and bolted on reviews and ratings written by people who had actually gone, which it claimed as a first for the live entertainment industry.

What it was genuinely good at was the long middle of American live performance. Not Broadway openings, which sell themselves, but the regional company, the comedy night, the touring musical in its fourth week. Jim McCarthy started it with Richard Webster and Robert Graff out of Pasadena, and by the end the site was listing cities from New York to Seattle.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it worked ~

Membership was free and the discount was real. The final capture of goldstar.com, taken at 03:19 UTC on 26 April 2024, still has Save 50% on Queen of Hearts at Théâtre XIV and Save 60% on Million Dollar Quartet at Musical Theatre West. Sitting beside those are full-price listings, Hadestown from $82 and Aladdin from $121, because by its last day the site was also just selling Broadway like everybody else.

~ the acquisition ~

TodayTix Group bought Goldstar in January 2022. Variety reported it on 5 January, and the framing at the time was that Goldstar would carry on as an independent brand inside the group, which is what every acquirer says and is occasionally even true.

The two companies were buying each other's weaknesses. TodayTix had the app-first, last-minute audience and the West End. Goldstar had twenty years of regional inventory and a membership list that opened its email.

~ the day the domain turned ~

It held for two years. The archive has goldstar.com serving its own storefront, fully stocked, on the morning of 26 April 2024. By 16:06 UTC that same day every request to it was a redirect, and it has been a redirect in every capture since. Goldstar then announced on 30 April that it was officially TodayTix, welcoming its members to their new home for tickets and perks.

No farewell page was ever posted. The last thing goldstar.com served under its own name was a working product with Carmen at the Met and more than half off a burlesque Alice in Wonderland. The address answers 404 today.

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