NC State Fair's press release regarding 2nd show.

RALEIGH – Clay Aiken fans will have one more opportunity to see him perform at the 2004 North Carolina State Fair. Due to an overwhelmingly large interest in the first concert, a second show has been booked for Monday, Oct. 18, at 3 p.m. in Dorton Arena.

Fairgoers can purchase reserved tickets for $15 online at www.ncstatefair.org beginning Monday, Sept. 27, at noon. Once again, because only 6,000 seats are available, there will be a limit of four tickets per person for this concert. There will be no free seating available for this show.

The first Clay Aiken concert sold out within 10 minutes of going on sale on Friday, Sept. 3. In addition, ticket sales for the other Fair concerts have been strong.

The State Fair will employ the same online ordering process for the second show. The State Fair contracts with Yahoo! to sell tickets online. The State Fair creates its own State Fair Store using the Yahoo! server.

Online sales were successful except for one glitch created when Yahoo! staff started troubleshooting a slowdown in the checkout process. Yahoo! had never experienced a situation like this and took actions to correct it. To try to get to the root of the situation, Yahoo! added 1,001 tickets to the concert's total inventory, which meant there were more tickets than seats available. This troubleshooting measure was done without informing State Fair staff members who were monitoring the online sales. A total of 694 of these "extra" tickets were sold before the site could be shut down. This led to an oversell of Clay Aiken concert tickets.

"We understand that human error occurs," said State Fair Manager Wesley Wyatt. "We have been working with Yahoo! to resolve the issue and are confident that the system will work properly during the second online sale. We will contact people who purchased the extra tickets to the first show and provide them the option of getting favorable seats to the 3 p.m. show."

Please contact Tiffany Budd at (919) 733-4216 for more information.