With only two weeks to go, organisers of the Glastonbury Festival have opted for a bit of old-fashioned bricks-and-mortar retailing to ensure that this year's edition is a sell-out.

Thousands of tickets for the five-day festival went on sale today at HMV music stores around the country, offering latecomers the chance to join in Britain's biggest musical event.

It's a far cry from recent years when the competition to buy tickets online has been fierce. Last year the festival sold out through the Glastonbury website in just a few hours

After the third straight mudbath and with increased competition from more customer –

friendly boutique festivals – some of them in places with sunshine virtually guaranteed – Glastonbury now appears to have lost some of its shine.

A Glastonbury spokesman said 100,000 of the 137,500 tickets available this year sold online on the first day. "But the ones after that have been slower to go and our thing, having talked to people, is that it's because the weather had not been too brilliant in the past three years," he said. "It's been so wet."

Organisers dismiss complaints that this year's poor sales were because of a negative reaction to the naming of Jay-Z, the American rapper, at the top of the bill. There are, they say, some 999 other acts to choose from.

Tickets, at £155 each, are available from HMV stores in Bristol, Newcastle, Manchester, Birmingham, Cardiff and Oxford Street, London. In line with the festival's anti-touting policy, the name of each festival-goer has to be given at the point of sale and photo ID taken to the festival itself.

Glastonbury runs from Wednesday June 25 to Monday June 30.

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