Stadium of Fire sells out in minutes

PROVO — People lined up outside BYU's Marriott Center Friday night with hopes of getting a ticket to this year's Stadium of Fire at Lavell Edwards Stadium, that features teen star Miley Cyrus, but only the first 250 were lucky enough to reach the box office before tickets were sold out in a record-breaking ticket sales operation for Utah, officials said. Most of the 58,000 tickets were grabbed online.

"We've always sold out at these shows," according to the show's executive producer, Brad Pelo. "I think the Beach Boys sold out in two weeks." But that 1992 feat was royally trumped last night by a 15-year-old pop star big enough to sustain two-household names: Miley Cyrus and Hannah Montana.

Brigham Young University ticket sales sold its first ticket at 5 p.m. By 5:10, its registers' tills were full and the ticket machines empty, Pelo said.

Those lucky enough to draw a first-in-line number that guaranteed them a chance at a ticket window exited the Marriott Center's doors with white envelopes brimming with as many of the tickets as they could afford. Each reacted to the purchase differently. Some just grinned, others skipped to their cars in the overflowing parking lot. And a few broke out into song

"I've got a golden ticket," one woman belted out in vibrato, as she skipped up the building's concrete ramp.

Others stashed their envelopes like classified documents, stuffing them deep into pockets, and even cowboy boots, before walking out into a crowd of coveting eyes.

Can they be blamed?

Folks were throwing down between $875 and $3,125 on the average envelope — a figure ticket sales personnel didn't expect.

They originally thought buyers would purchase six to nine tickets at a time according to average purchase data from the past three years, but when the clock struck 5, their calculations crashed — hard.

"Suddenly, everyone was buying 25 tickets at a time," Pelo said. "There's no way we could have predicted that."

Cyrus' recent concert at the Energy Solutions Arena in Salt Lake City sold out quickly, too, Pelo continued. "But it was only something like a 13,000-seat concert."

But the Stadium of Fire blasted through 5,850 ticket sales a minute and in a better mind-gripping figure, that's 97.5 sales a second.

If you didn't get your tickets, eBay may be your only shot.