What Ticketmaster is doing about technical debt

Ticketing systems are products sold to a presenter or promoter (or venue) and facilitate their business.

Once I have bought tickets, traveled 500 kilometers, stayed at hotel near venue. Once I got there, there was dozens of people confused about place being shut. It turned out that the gig as cancelled and Ticketmaster forgot to notify buyers about it. This was for one of the well known US bands, so there was a lot of people there. The reason of cancellation was sickness of one of the members of the band that was announced on other site also selling tickets a week earlier so only Ticketmaster customers were affected.

Imagine disappointment. Also, I didn't get refund for tickets either despite requesting it.

Their job isn't really to do either of those things, and I'm not being glib. Let me explain:

First, TicketMaster (TM) doesn't really want to print your tickets. They would much rather just digitally manage them, and let you use your phone to go the the venue. Non-digital media costs real money, and TM would prefer to charge you for the convenience of managing your tickets, or sending you a PDF. As a bonus to them, this lets you easily resell your tickets as a fan on their TM+ exchange.

Secondly, TM doesn't really want to stop scalpers, at least not completely. This one is a bit complex, because portions of TM are definitely not scalper (i.e. broker) friendly, while other portions are. TM runs their own secondary market, called TM+, which is a "fan resale" market, in which they list ticket that were sold on the primary market (i.e. TM) for resale, with the benefit that since they were the original seller, they actually reissue the tickets with new barcodes and they are guaranteed to be accurate and work for entry. They are quite happy to work with the broker industry on this side, and will integrate with larger brokers to allow listings to be easily updated.

Personally, I think the bad names brokers get as a whole are often unwarranted, as there is a lot of benefit to a secondary market that people often ignore when they see extremely expensive tickets, such as extremely underpriced tickets for events that bomb (or another date is added), and the ability to find tickets for an event long after it's sold out (without a resale market, you would have little recourse to see an event that sold out minutes after it went on sale unless you got your tickets right then). That said, there are some bad actors in this arena, which brings us to the following...

> I don't mean terrible as in they do the job poorly, it's just that they care 0% about the user experience during the entire ticketing process from end-to-end.

TM has a really hard job. I'm not sure you understand the scale of traffic they get on a popular event's main sale. They can literally sell out a 30,000 seat venue in seconds. Keep in mind, on a sale that's busy like that, there are often brokers (the bad actors referenced before) that are running industry software that leverages AWS/GCE/Linode/Rackspace, etc to access the main sale page tens to hundreds of times a second per instance during that sale to get CAPTCHA words and answer them. Since the CAPTCHA success rate is relatively low, they brute force it with many, many parallel requests. Consider that during peak sale season, there may be multiple of these large sales per hour, all set to open on the hour. TM is constantly battling these brokers by changing subtly how their ticketing system functions. It's not that they don't care about customer experience (although they do have enough of the market to not have to worry too much), but that it's only part of an equation that must also be balanced with insane levels of load balancing and queuing to handle the crazy load they see.

Now, I don't want to give the impression that TM is without fault. They've definitely got their fingers in multiple industries here which historically have had quite a bit of animosity, and they are fairly good at playing the media and the industries against one each other while secretly assuaging them in the background. The fact of the matter is that you as a customer aren't their only concern and aren't their only business. They are actively balancing the needs of the promoters, artists, venue and brokers, because their business caters to all of them.

Edit: Clarified scope of virtual server usage slightly.

Basically nothing.

I mean, they know when they'll have a surge in customers (there's a freakin countdown clock to the purchase time) and yet they still can't set up something more elastic that actually allows me to load the page?

Apparently, Ticketmaster's business model is based on taking the negative public relations hit for charging higher prices on behalf of their customers.

If you create a startup called CheaperTickets.com with the noble intention of not charging those hated service fees, you won't get any customers. (Keep in mind it's the venues & the artists that are the real customers of Ticketmaster and not the ticket buyers). The venues want the lucrative cut of the service fees while Ticketmaster gladly takes the heat.

[1]http://www.laweekly.com/music/ticketmaster-and-servants-band...

[2]http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1xlt0i/til_ti...

Unfortunately, Ticketmaster has a habit of just buying/merging with competitors (including Live Nation, in a merger that should have never been allowed to go through).

Plus, Live Nation actually owns a lot of venues, so you'll never see them use another ticketing provider: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_Nation_Entertainment#Venu...

Ticketmaster is practically a saint next to them in my eyes.

The barriers are the very typical ones that big companies (as a matter of fact, I assume that the venue with the greatest exposure are in fact big companies) face towards innovation: bureaucracy, lock-in, inertia, PHBs, and so on.

Not that TM doesn't have any positive side - it's just a very typical example of the business workings of large companies (not all, of course).