When an email arrived in our inbox back in early October announcing that AXS, an online ticketing service operated by AEG, had formed an exclusive ticketing partnership with The Arlington Theatre, it automatically went into the ever-expanding file of news from the ongoing ticket wars. Ever since the Ticketmaster/Live Nation merger was approved back in 2010, entertainment writers and live music fans have been more or less willing participants in a rapidly evolving situation driven by two main forces: the massive, sudden profits available on the secondary market; and the battle of the twin titans, AEG/Goldenvoice and Live Nation/Ticketmaster, for control of the primary ticket market.
It’s been a wild ride, featuring litigation, legislation (the Better Online Ticket Sales Act, or BOTS Act, signed by President Obama in December 2016), and consolidation, such as recent collaborations between Ticketmaster and YouTube, and AXS and Spotify. Whether you are a casual concertgoer interested in seeing top artists at your area venue or a diehard fanatic determined to catch as many shows as you possibly can by your main musical squeeze, what’s happening with ticket sales online matters. When secondary market prices for high-demand shows routinely soar into four figures just minutes after primary market tickets go on sale, surely fans are entitled to ask what promoters, venues, and ticketing companies are doing to keep them from being shut out. The short answer is “a lot,” but the long answer is a better one that seems to grow longer by the day. What follows is a necessarily incomplete account of some of the latest moves that may have an impact not only on what you pay for the next show you see but also on whether you get a chance to buy tickets at all.
There are certain things that virtually everyone agrees on, and one of them is that “bots,” computer programs written specifically to purchase as many tickets as possible for the purpose of reselling — or scalping — them on the secondary market, are not cool. For certain high-demand events such as the Broadway show Hamilton, it’s estimated that as much as 40 percent of the available tickets were scored by bots, allowing professional scalpers to resell tickets that cost them a couple of hundred dollars for upward of a thousand. The fact that this happened, and continues to happen, is part of the business model for a company like StubHub, which does not necessarily guarantee (or know) where the tickets it brokers are coming from. It was this huge, open digital door that Ticketmaster claims a company called Prestige Entertainment drove through when they acquired 30,000 Hamilton tickets in a period of just two years, and when they nabbed more than 50 percent of the seats available through Ticketmaster to the Floyd Mayweather-Manny Pacquiao fight. According to Ticketmaster’s suit, Prestige and its associates used a bewildering array of bots, email and IP addresses, credit cards, and physical addresses to place 313,528 orders using 9,047 different accounts between January 2015 and September 2016, all in a (successful!) attempt to realize tens of millions of dollars in profit.