When You’re Too Late For Springsteen Tickets, It’s Because of Bots
Back in the day, how long it took to sell out a show was a thing.
Before the internet, when people lined up at record stores, grocery stores, or prepared to call on the phone to snatch up tickets to their favorite shows, they had a chance to actually get some.
Then, we'd wait for reports of how long it took for the big shows to sell out. The largest artists would whip the whole city into a frenzy of standing in line, or recruiting friends and family members to call from their houses.
If anyone gets through, buy the tickets and I'll pay you back!
Bruce Springsteen, the Stones, and U2 were the ones that I remember setting records. They sold out in minutes.
Now, the arena will sell out in seconds. Or less. And it's not fans buying the tickets.
Secondary ticket brokers, scalping services, and other organizations that buy up tickets and resell them at huge profits are using software to bump the fans out of the process. If you are calling on your phone or logging into buy, say Springsteen tickets for his Denver show (see our article), the chances of you even getting a ticket are slim.
When Taylor Swift tickets go on sale, they are gone in moments.
Ticket bots are ruining the concert industry, because they make it so that tickets just aren't available to the fans at face value. The software that it takes is pretty simple and very effective, so brokers are buying blocks of thousands of tickets with numerous credit cards and often times, teams of employees.
The NYTimes had this to say about the situation:
...bots have been used to buy more than 60 percent of the most desirable tickets for some shows; in a recent lawsuit, the company accused one group of scalpers of using bots to request up to 200,000 tickets a day.
As you can see in the video above, action is being taken by the New York Attorney General, hopefully with more states to follow.
The artists are there for their fans, and anything that illegally interrupts that should be eliminated.