On the day tickets for the Gorillaz show on September 20 went on sale, I was at school. The night before, I had devised a plan: during second period, I would (conveniently) ask to use the restroom two minutes before tickets went on sale. Setting the plan into motion, I locked the stall door and unlocked my phone, the Ticketmaster page already loaded and my debit card in hand. I counted down the seconds.
The moment 8:30 a.m. hit, I jumped on the best available seats, but received an error: “These seats have already been sold. Please try again.” I refreshed the page, conceding the seats to another quick buyer. Already, many of the seats had been blotted out, indicating they had already been sold. I tried again with a new pair of seats, but the screen read, “These seats have already been sold. Please try again.” Starting to panic now, I refreshed and tried yet another pair, only to see, “These seats have already been sold. Please try again.” Upon my final refresh, the entire show had been sold out. Crushed, I closed the page and trudged back to class.
That night, I checked another ticket vendor and was surprised to discover that all of the seats that had disappeared from Ticketmaster were available there—on StubHub. The only difference was that the seats were now $150 each instead of $60 and StubHub was not offering free CDs of the new Gorillaz album. It turns out, I didn’t lose my seats to fast-typing die-hard concertgoers; I lost them to parasites called scalper bots.
Scalper bots are automated processes that wait for ticket sales to go live, then automatically buy every ticket in mere seconds, giving real human beings no chance to get them. Then, the companies that create the bots (like StubHub) put the tickets up for re-sale at two or three times the price, often without offering free merchandise that the original seller promised, like the free Gorillaz CDs.
So what can be done to fight automated scalpers? Last year, Senator Chuck Schumer and “Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda worked together to convince President Obama to sign the Better Online Ticket Sales (BOTS) Act of 2016.
Chuck Schumer is John Connor.
The bots are Skynet.
I guess that makes me Sarah Connor, which is awesome. https://t.co/RqximYPWe5
— Lin-Manuel Miranda (@Lin_Manuel) August 15, 2016
The act made using scalper bots and reselling tickets purchased by bots illegal nationwide. A proposed bill plans to do the same in Ontario and limit ticket resales to 50% of the ticket’s face value. Artists such as Bruce Springsteen, Adele, Miley Cyrus, Tom Waits, Metallica, AC/DC, Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift have taken advantage of Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan program. This program requires ticket buyers to provide personal information weeks in advance to prove they are a real person. If the algorithm decides the buyer is not a bot, they are allowed to purchase tickets. Tom Petty voided and resold 600 tickets to his joint Tom Petty/Pearl Jam concert, as well as 800 more for his show at Madison Square Garden. Chance the Rapper bought thousands of tickets to his own “Magnificent Coloring Day” festival from “fuckboy scalpers” to be resold to real people:
I took back almost 2k #MCD tix from fuckboy scalpers and made them into physicals. And these are just floor seats pic.twitter.com/EaFfoFeuIA
— Lil Chano From 79th (@chancetherapper) September 9, 2016
It is incredibly hard to fight bots. For each new development in verification (such as CAPTCHA), there are hundreds of people working on breaking it. Bots are rarely operated from within the country, making it difficult (if not impossible) to penalize anyone. But with high-profile artists stepping up to direct tickets back into the hands of fans and shedding light on the shady world of ticket re-sale, we are definitely moving in the right direction.