Ticketmaster's tech problem isn't a tech problem
mattstoller.substack.com
mattstoller.substack.com
Swift hasn't. And probably won't in the future, thats the gist of it.
TM claimed (and I have no reason to not believe them) they got 5 billion requests when tickets went live. So you break up the monopoly and Swift can now sign with a different ticket seller next tour. Which other website will handle the 5 billion requests properly? Without hours of queues or random raffles? Fans are lucky the TM website didn't completely shut down for 2 days because of the traffic
As long as the tickets are sellable, as long as people will pay more for a ticket than a new car, people (even diehard fans) will resell
I absolutely have a reason to not believe them: that is 63% of the world's population. They are claiming that 63% of everyone on Earth was waiting to buy tickets to Taylor Swift's show? How do we not have reason to disbelieve them!?
Unless by "request" they mean individual HTTP requests and their site is such garbage that one person trying to grab some tickets induces thousands upon thousands of HTTP requests, which is still their fault.
She probably made several hundred million on this tour. She could fix all the problems but she doesn't want to.
Its TM's job to take this bad press
No, she can't. At best, she can exchange one set of problems for a different set. When there are X tickets available and Y people want to attend and Y>>X, a lot of people are going to be disappointed and angry no matter what you do.
Here's what the website for my local big venue says:
"Please note the TD Garden Box Office does not sell tickets at the public on sale. All tickets should be purchased via www.ticketmaster.com"
Truly annoying.
That said, Ticketmaster has been terrible forever. It's baffling how they've gotten this far while being so blatantly bad.
That's not true. Granted, one would have to go back at least 35 years, but there was a time that TicketMaster was just the outsource vendor to sell tickets. They'd tack on a few bucks for the privilege, sorted. Don't like it? Go to the box office. I don't recall having any reason to complain.
But that's the trick: no one had reason to complain, and more and more venues used TM while TM gobbled up competitors. Now that there is reason to complain, it's apparently too late.
I think he is saying it is a tech problem whose root cause is a monopoly problem (leading to long-term underinvestment).
This one caught TM sideways, clearly, and something scaled badly. I'm hoping we get a good technical post-mortem at some point.
But nailing on-sales is one of Ticketmaster's main value props for clients.
As they say, nobody got fired for having Ticketmaster sell their tickets.
I've been on the inside for very successful high-demand on-sales run by the TM VerifiedFan team. They worked.
Even Google and Amazon struggle on huge black friday events. This is ridiculous.
-lack of competition leads to lack of innovation (Stoller's argument)
-lack of innovation results in less spending on R&D
-less innovation means the most efficient way to maximize profit is to find "efficiencies" in the business
-those "efficiencies" manifest as: -less spending on R&D because there is no need; -lower salaries to employees; -fewer employees overall; -worse quality: -Squeeze suppliers and contractors, putting more pressure across the board to consolidate and reinforcing the Cycle across the entire chain
If left unchecked (as the "consumer harm" doctrine has for the past 40 years or so), the results are:
-overall concentration of power and wealth
-greater wealth disparities
-less investment and innovation
-fewer choices that provide worse consumer experience
This pattern has been pretty well documented across many industries, from shipping to cheerleading
People claim it is “evil scalpers”, but if you got lucky and bought a $400 ticket you can flip for $3000, they probably would be doing so as well.
A lot of the Ticketmaster “fees” people hate are actually part of the ticket price, requested by and paid directly to the artist (or the venue), but charged separately to make the tickets seem cheaper. Don’t blame me, blame human psychology.
I don't know how he keeps a venue booked for an indeterminate number of shows. How far ahead does his team plan? But for the road crews and performers it must be easier. They don't have to set up and tear down their gear every 3 days.
On the other hand, Taylor has more fans and more cities she has to visit than Garth. If she did that, it might turn into a perma-tour until her popularity crests.
The Ticketing service itself should provide a channel to sell a ticket at its original price if someone wants it.
In Italy that's the method since a similar fiasco happened years ago and it works pretty well
It's the prioritization of the secondary market.
Ticketmaster literally holds back a large number of tickets specifically to sell to scalpers.
This has a vicious cycle effect, making the secondary market more profitable and incentivizing more people to be scalpers. It also takes more tickets out of the hands of people who would otherwise buy them for retail price, meaning they have to buy from the scalpers.
And because Ticketmaster is the only game in town, that takes this from being a problem that could be dealt with by not doing business with them to being a problem that's just unavoidable.
only 5% of taylor swift tickets ended up on the secondary market. This is just false.
Second if scalpers are selling @ cost tickets on secondary markets, TM is not even the biggest. Stubhub is. How does that benefit TM ?
Even if it was purely accidental, the incentives that ensuing PR brings when it happens mean there’s not going to be much concern about fixing things.
Sure you could argue that antitrust attention is bad for them, but what’s the realistic outcome there? Lip service punditry, maybe even a congressional hearing! And nothing. Not many politicians are going to wast limited political capital against a fleeting issue their base won’t care about in a month from now.
Art is, somewhat by definition, a monopoly. There's no way around that, the only thing you can do is have more concerts/supply of it, but that's literally more work for the artist involved.
I think it's Garth Brooks that's notorious for planning his tours where he'll just keep adding more concert dates in a city until they stop selling out at $30 tickets and then move to the next town and repeat it. That works, but you also have to be willing to play the same town 10 days in a row or something, which isn't free for a musician to do in terms of exhaustion and effort.
If you're Taylor Swift or the like, you're playing 30k person stadiums and have a stage setup that takes most of a full day or two to set up and tear down. You likely have to book the venue years in advance, and the logistics of getting you, your 30 backup musicians and dancers, all your stage tech, and god knows what else around the world is the sort of thing that's not really amenable to just adjusting on the fly.
Once you're big enough that you're competing with like... international sports events and entire music festivals for space, you're just working in a different world of constraints. In some ways, it's similar to scalability in computing. If your personal website or side project blows up, it's easy to find the space to double or even 10x the resources. If you're Netflix and somehow you double your demand, there may not even be available resources in the world to help you, and you can't just fall back to doing something smaller by choice.
I would have thought it would be unusual to have a venue with 10 dates in a row available though. I guess if you do this far enough in advance it would work in many places, but I would think most big arenas would have only a few consecutive dates at the most, working around the sports and other artists and conventions and whatever else is going on there.
The issue that you run into with the "just keep adding dates" is less that you're stuck somewhere for 10 days, but more that instead of your tour being a tight 2-3 months and you're done, there's not really anything that stops your 10 city tour from taking 10 months if people keep buying the tickets.
Yeah, but some artists actually do like to tour. And its where they make the most money, since record sales aren't really a thing anymore. Even when they were, I think touring was still the bigger moneymaker for most acts.
You say unprecedented demand... ok.
Let's say if the tickets were priced at $200 that would be more than enough to cover all the costs and pay people fairly etc.
But because of "unprecedented demand" on a fixed item.. they might say:
"Hey why not charge $300, or $400, or $500! Sure, 90% of the population that doesn't make great money won't be able to afford them, but the top 5-10% of people will still pay because it doesn't matter to them.. and we get to double or triple our profits!"
That is simply greed outweighing.. public interest (for lack of a better word). The problem with this world is so many people want to make as much as they can even if it's not "fair". I know that's just horrible anti-capitalist talk...
Maximizing profits is literally inconsistent with the well being of the population. This situation is the perfect example. Most people go to their econ101 supply & demand bullshit to justify price gouging and wealth inequality.
But I think I see your larger point. Imagine if this was not concert tickets, but a sudden food shortage. We already see it with housing and medical care. Solving the scarcity problem by price alone can get really unfair and dehumanizing in a hurry.
They have an effing HUGE tech problem.
The site crashing isn't because of "demand for the tickets" at least not by normal people's definition.
It's not that there's really "There is much more demand for these tickets than there are supply of tickets" as matai_kolila suggested here.
Ticketmaster's problem is very much that there are huge bot swarms attacking it for every popular ticket sale, because reselling tickets is WAY more profitable, than pointing a few thousand bots at it for a few hours.
Anyone who's tried to order tickets from ticketmaster in the past decade knows that it's a massive pain in the ass of hurdle jumping. That hurdle jumping has nothing to do with the humans attempting to buy tickets. It's bot mitigation.
It is not in ticketmaster's interest to facilitate scalping.
1. they don't profit from it. (no $) 2. humans blame them for it. (bad pr) 3. artists blame them for it (potential loss of $)
now, they've got a bunch of stadiums lock in to literal hundred year contracts so, to some degree they're safe financially as far as big performances go because those artists can't go anywhere _other_ than the stadiums they have locked down. Practically speaking Taylor Swift can't perform at your local bar and announce it. A) there'd be a mob. B) it wouldn't be profitable enough for anything other than just testing out songs.
> Why was Ticketmaster’s system so poorly structured?
I can't say that it is or is not poorly structured. I can say, that regardless of how good of a job Ticketmaster's devs do, they are fighting an unwinnable war. All they can do is gain and loose a little ground against the bot makers every round.
This post was obviously written by someone with no clue of the existence, or significance, of the technological warfare Ticketmaster is constantly involved it.
To be clear, I am, in no way, commenting on the practices of the company, or their business decisions.
I am ONLY saying that they have a HUGE tech problem and when the site goes down or is otherwise effed, it is a _very_ safe bet, that it has nothing to do with the humans trying to buy tickets.
More competition might reduce fees, but won't turn ticketing sites into state lotteries. Just like some domain name registrars, these sites provide a service but also benefit from powering the technology.
And even if the problem were fixed for TS events, what about all the other ever present ticketmaster rip-offs?
I have no doubt that she could equity finance it considering she can guarantee sell-outs at every venue she plays.
> And even if the problem were fixed for TS events, what about all the other ever present ticketmaster rip-offs?
This is the real problem. The biggest artists doing this might hurt Ticketmaster's bottom line, but there are a ton of smaller venues that book artists that don't have the guarantee of selling out and can't just decide to self-finance tours on public grounds...
She can. The issue is that she will overwhelm them and that becomes a public safety issue. Police, fire dept, etc... they all get involved. Fact is that the venues large enough to hold her are ALL owned or at least have some sort of connection to Live Nation.
It goes deeper than that though. One time, `Bone Thugs and Harmony` were in town for a show on Saturday (at a LN venue). Friday night, they wanted to perform to a smaller audience of their core fans, so we agreed to host them at the last minute.
We made a radio spot to let people know. The text that was read got modified at the very end to say "the show has sold out" (I even have a recording of it somewhere on my computer). We didn't put that in there. It was wild, nobody showed up and we were out of $50k. Who modified it? Well, LN owns the radio stations too. They were pissed that BTH would even consider playing at a non-LN club.
I couldn't afford to sue LN, so we just ate the loss. It sucked and did some real damage to my business.
We could have easily made the $50k+ in bar sales + tickets + share of merch sales. It was a last minute event on a night we didn't have otherwise filled, so breaking even was fine.
Instead, we ended up in debt. Fuck Live Nation (at the time it was just Clear Channel). I hope this Taylor thing blows the doors off their monopoly.
She made hundreds of millions on this tour. Its funny you all think that maximizing her profit wasn't the goal here
I thought the tickets were selling well below a normal market clearing price.
I have issues with how they are profiting from the entire chain of custody of the ticket (with little alternative for customers). They own the ticketing of certain artists' tours, they own the rights to ticketing many venues (so there is no way for any artist to play certain places without signing to be ticketed by them), and they own the reseller platform. They have end to end control on the pricing and fees across the music ticketing ecosystem and continue to nickel and dime consumers.
There is nothing convenient about their convenience fees and they aren't innovating to benefit customers (or artists to be honest).
I will be pretty annoyed if they break up ticketmaster and the avg price paid by concertgoers increases due to competition between ticket sellers, done under the guise of "consumer harm".
I can see people purchased taylor swift tickets from ticketmaster at an 80% discount compared to resellers. That goes away in a competitive market.
They don't own the reseller platform. Stubhub is the largest in this category.
>There is nothing convenient about their convenience fees and they aren't innovating to benefit customers (or artists to be honest)
You're pretending the goal here is not to maximize artist profit. Theres a lot that the artist could demand to fix all of these problems. They don't
There is much more demand for these tickets than there are supply of tickets, so my econ 101 tells me the price should go up until the demand drops to match the supply.
Any other argument just feels like sour grapes from folks who don't have the means to buy this luxury item.
Separately, Ticketmaster's monopoly is concerning, but in this case I don't see that impacting prices. In fact it seems like Ticketmaster did try to do a handful of things to artificially lower ticket prices, those things just were not effective due to technical issues (so the article title may be wrong).
Music fans like to moralize about how they "deserve" to go to concerts, but the reality is nobody deserves to go anywhere; attending a concert is not something you must do in order to survive. It's not even a thing you must do in order to enjoy an artist's music or support that artist. There is absolutely no imperative or necessity to attend this tour, and in cases like that I have no problem with pricing matching demand and supply pretty directly.
Basically, they've abused a monopoly position, and painted a target on their backs by trying to nickle and dime folks.
That argument has been tried in court, and doesn't work. That murderous criminal can still be punished, despite the fact the reason they killed someone was because it was part of their role as a criminal.
If people aren't scalping tickets on TM they will do it on the stubhub, seatgeek, vivid, etc.
The overall problem is arbitrage. These tickets are literally worth 1k and are selling for 100.
The reason ticketmaster can get away with bad tech solutions is there's no alternative. No alternative means no incentive to improve. And though consumer prices may be lower, venues and artists get squeezed, without really seeing an additional benefit and since there is no alternative Ticketmaster can call the shots.
On a related note, it's extraordinarily shameful that the culture of anti trust has centered exclusively on higher prices since the 80s. I'm glad to see enforcers in DC slowly abandoning this misguided reason and we'll hopefully get back to something resembling the trust-busting of the 30s and 40s
Even google and Amazon struggle on Black Fridays
Yes, TM has a concerning amount of control over venues and therefore artists, but in this scenario, that's not very relevant, given the insane demand and the basic physics problem involved with trying to stuff 12 million people into spaces (at a time) that hold a total of maybe 2.
It's just weird to me how we can't separate the issues. TM's main insult to the Swifties were the technical issues, not their potential monopoly. Ticket prices would be insane regardless.
Instead, ALL monopolies have an incentive to minimize supply and maximize price. So of course demand exceeds supply.
No, this is not the right argument. She had to go with the biggest venues in the US to fit as many people as possible, and she's already added a ton of extra dates.
There is a fundamental limit to the number of people who can attend this tour, and that number is lower than the number of people who want to attend this tour, therefore prices will go up until the demand for tickets matches the supply of tickets.
Independent venues would not have made a lick of difference in this case, these ticket prices would be sky high no matter who was selling them.
People seem to be ignoring or forgetting that basic idea.
Not sure if you're being serious, thats like saying what kind of value does Amazon add selling other stores products.
Ticketmaster essentially gives tickets to insiders + high spending fans first (this loyalty based prioritization happened in Taylor Swift sales). A new company might say reserve tranches of tickets for different age groups or income groups, etc. to reward more types of fans (not just super spenders).
You're right that it's a scarce resource, but I don't think that justifies a monopoly on the distributor of that scarce resource.
I think the issue is that there is no competition amongst ticketing services. Ticketmaster is by far the biggest (and effectively the only) player, and they abuse that monopoly by demanding exclusive agreements with venues (or outright owning the venues) in order to prevent alternate ticketing services from entering the market.
But no ticketing service is really going to have any motivation to reserve tickets for low income groups or anything like that. They are going to want to sell every ticket to the buyer who is willing to pay the most for it.
Maybe you should open your mind to the possibility that what you were taught in econ 101 is partly (mostly) bullshit. I have an economics degree and I've come to learn more in life that it's so much bs for the most part.
First of all, if there was relatively wealth equality, then it might be more realistic to say "ok, they will increase the price to some level until people want to stop buying it".
The problem is, there is so much wealth inequality that ticket prices just keep rising so only the top 5-10% of people can afford anything. Let's say a family is making $200k a year. A ticket price going from $50 to $100 to $200 isn't that big of a deal, they will still pay it.
But it completely fucks the rest (majority) of the population that isn't making that kind of money. They want to go to a concert as well. They want to go to a football game. But the prices are so outrageous they can't afford it.
However this well off/wealthy part of the population is willing to pay it.. so something like Ticketmaster just keeps pushing prices as much as they can.
This whole supply/demand thing is utter crap when there is wealth inequality. People like you use get this smug look on your face and talk about supply & demand like it's some kind of inherent law of nature. You know what it's based on? GREED. It's literally based on charging AS MUCH AS YOU CAN to people instead of a "fair" price. By fair I mean ensuring that the seller is reasonably compensated and that the majority of the population can still afford. Yes "fair" is not easy to define, I get that. But it's clear that "fair" is not charging as much as you possibly can just because a small majority of the population will still pay for it.
Ticket prices are not "reasonable" by any means. It's literally rich people charging as much as they can because they know rich people will just pay it. Not giving one shit about anyone else because "supply & demand"!
>Music fans like to moralize about how they "deserve" to go to concerts, but the reality is nobody deserves to go anywhere; attending a concert is not something you must do in order to survive
Ah, so the well off / rich "deserve" to go to concerts because they make more money. But people struggling don't "deserve" similar forms of entertainment. Glad you cleared that up. Seriously, that sentiment pisses me off to no end and it's literally one of the biggest problem in the world.
I make good money so I'm not coming at this from the struggling perspective. But every year that goes by this whole world pisses me off even more because there is no compassion. It's all about money. It's all about making more money. It's all about maximizing profits and squeezing as much as you can from everyone else so you get yours. It's all about getting what you want and not someone else.
Yeah I'm ranting here, but I'm not sure how one could sit back and read this "supply & demand" and "people don't deserve X because they don't make Y" without going bonkers.
It's not just about price and wealth inequality. If everyone decides they want to go to the same event then some will be disappointed and they'll complain bitterly.
I've been to large concerts and big stadium events. It's not worth it. The events actually seared into my mind are the tiny ones, like seeing a band I'd followed for years in a small bar in Copenhagen and being within arm's reach. What am I trying to say here? Those tickets that everyone is clamouring to get probably have a very low experience value if people would only seek out other things to fill the same hole they purport to have.
Economically, completely true. Though there's a social argument that when only comparatively rich people can access live entertainment, society suffers. I think that's a bit contrived, but it's worth considering.
Ultimately this falls on the artists to solve. If they don't want their concertgoers to be exclusively trust fund babies, it's on them to distribute their tickets better rather than everyone getting annoyed at TM and scalpers. This could be lottery and strict ID checks (e.g. Glastonbury) or it could be some way of rewarding loyal fans with reduced price tickets.
Maybe ABBA Voyage type shows are the future for improving accessibility of popular bands. Japan has the Hatsune/vocaloid concerts. Or maybe people need to consider supporting their local small bands over fighting each other for Taylor Swift tickets. I've been to plenty of small gigs for less than £20 and it's much more fun than spending £200 to sit half a mile away.
Taylor Swift could theoretically do more shows, assuming she's physically capable, but she's already doing 2-3 shows in every venue on this tour[0].
There are weird incentives for artists, especially pop artists. They want young fans to be able to attend the shows, because that makes them fans for life. Conversely, young fans being shut out leads to them losing interest. But it's not feasible to means-test people buying tickets, so no matter what price you set them at, you can't be sure that the trust fund babies and scalpers won't get there first. In fact, you can be guaranteed the scalpers will get there first, this is what they do!
Strict ID checks are frustrating for everyone and still don't always seem to work. Fan club ticket windows are great in theory, and I've taken advantage of that myself to get U2 tickets, but all that's really doing is adding additional expense, as scalpers learn quickly that they must pay $20 to join the fan club for every four tickets they intend to scalp.
It's a tough problem, and perhaps one without a real solution. There's only so much TSwift to go around.
The problem isn't that it's a monopoly. It's that the venues don't shop around, probably because they don't pay the price. The consumer does.
Anecdote != data
Cyber did an episode that covered this in more detail, btw: https://www.vice.com/en/article/z348k3/cyber-why-concert-tic...