Austin City Limits

[Driftwood1]

Nearly impossible to get tix to see it, which is annoying..

[mimimomx3]

Yes, this is where being an old timer or someone with some pretty stiff connections is almost necessary. It's next to impossible (although I know someone will say they just walked in) to get tickets.

[mark311]

Originally Posted by mimimomx3

Yes, this is where being an old timer or someone with some pretty stiff connections is almost necessary. It's next to impossible (although I know someone will say they just walked in) to get tickets.

For the TV show, it's not always connections, but money that gets you in. A lot of the audience are part of the "Friends of KLRU/ACL" group as they get an allocation of "Guaranteed" tickets per year. Membership has three levels and is between $5,000 and $15,000 per year. From what I understand, they currently aren't even taking these donations anymore as they don't have enough space in the current studio. Of course, a lot of these people are older and give their tickets to friends and relatives.

The other way to get in is through space available tickets. You generally have to work a bit to get in this way. There will be an announcement by KLRU or another media outlet that you can sign up or get in line for space available tickets starting at a certain time. This announcement normally happens the day before and they tell you when you can get in line the next day before the performance. Then you need to go and lineup in front of the Communications building at UT about 2 hours or so before the time that they gave you if you want to ensure that you'll get an actual "space available" ticket (normally about 5:00pm). Then you get an actual space available ticket with a number on it. At about 7:00pm, you go back and get in line again, but this time in the order of the number that you received. You still aren't guaranteed entry yet with your space available ticket until they see how many of the real guaranteed tickets people show up (this is mostly the big money donors to KLRU and probably some people with connections). They let in the space available ticket people after all those guaranteed people about 20 minutes before the show. Sometimes all space available people get in and sometimes 95% of them are turned away and don't get in.

I've lived here for 3 years and I've been able to get into two ACL TV tapings during that time using the space available method. It's possible, but you normally have to be willing to give up about 4 hours of your time before the show waiting in line. For the out of towners, don't be confused as this is completely different than the big three day ACL Festival that is in October this year. That is open to the public and tickets can be purchased by anyone. You can buy tickets for that right now. Another note is that they sometimes don't even give out space available tickets for the really huge acts on the TV show. Generally all the guaranteed donor people show up to those shows anyway.

Update: If you have $5000 or more to donate to KLRU, you can get on the waiting list to make that donation. This link explains it: http://www.klru.org/support/foacl.html (broken link)
You can buy tickets to the big ACL festival in October through this link right now: http://www.aclfestival.com/tickets.aspx (broken link)