Tickets to a show headlined by Swedish pop star Gunther and his Sunshine Girls sold out hours after they were made available online, Yale College Council officers said Thursday.

All 1,500 free student tickets for tonight’s show, titled “Gunther and the Sunshine Girls: Live in Commons Dining Hall,” were reserved by early Thursday morning, YCC President Steven Syverud ’06 said. The tickets were released online at YaleStation at 4 p.m. on Wednesday and sold out by 12:35 a.m. Thursday, with 1,100 taken in the first hour after the release, YaleStation Director Will Tsui ’07 said.

“It was amazing how the show sold out under nine hours,” Tsui said. “We were all shocked.”

Syverud also said he did not expect the tickets to sell out as quickly as they did.

“I’m surprised because college students do things at the last minute and I was really skeptical that we would ultimately sell out at all,” he said. “I expected we’d have a few hundred people get tickets Wednesday, but that people would mostly wait until Friday afternoon.”

YCC Representative and Committee for Campus-Wide Activities member Bill Fishel ’08 said the first 200 students arriving without tickets will be let in. Student hip hop group 108tongues will perform in an hour-long pre-show starting at 9 p.m., and an hour-long music dance party is scheduled to take place after the show. Fishel said students who did not get tickets for the show can still attend the dance.

“We expect it’s going to clear out very much after the show, so that shouldn’t be an issue,” he said.

Some students who successfully reserved tickets said they are excited about the concert, though they said they would have been much less likely to attend had they been required to pay to see Gunther.

“I only purchased the ticket online because it was free,” Daniel Bleiberg ’09 said.

Even though she is not a fan of Gunther, Carrie Nguyen ’09 said she plans to attend the concert.

“I am just going for the novelty of it,” she said.

Other students said they were less than thrilled with the council’s choice of guests.

“Gunther is nothing spectacular, but just something comic,” Crystal Garcia ’09, who said she will not attend the concert, said. “I don’t think [the YCC] should have spent thousands of dollars for comic relief.”

Still, Christopher Rhodes ’09 said he did not obtain a ticket only because they sold out so quickly, and he plans to wait in line tonight for a chance to see the “Pleasureman.”

“Gunther is very talented and definitely worth seeing,” he said. “He can make awesome music without even speaking much.”

Syverud said he hopes tonight’s show will encourage students to take advantage of Yale funding for future events.

“It’s exactly the type of event that wouldn’t have been possible a year ago,” Syverud said. “I really hope it makes other students start to realize that the money is out there for them to design events on a whole new scale.”

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