Back in the day, The Who was presenting "Tommy". First time they were doing it live again. The "cheap" tickets were $75. This was a smaller venue.
$75 was a bit of money to be sure.
Back then you waited outside record stores to buy tickets. You'd line up, and sometime before the sale, they'd come out and hand out numbers, say 1 to 100. Then you'd sort by the number. Then they'd come out and say "We're starting the line at 37". 37 would be the front of the line, everyone else would sort behind that, wrapping around at the back. #36 would be the last in line.
When I went to buy Tommy tickets, they were also selling another acts tickets.
Since the tickets were so expensive, I went out of my way to go to a lower income neighborhood with the hope that there would be less folks in line to buy tickets, simply due to the price.
In the end, I got my ticket and the lady behind me did not. If they weren't selling the other act, maybe she would have made it.
When the Rolling Stones with Guns and Roses in LA went on sale, they gave out wristbands days in advance. My spot in line was around the building, the first show was sold out before I got there. The seats I did get were basically lousy when I did get them. That took an afternoon.
When I went to buy tickets at the venue, they handed out numbers, but they didn't scramble them. The numbers were random, but #1 was first in line. As soon as I got my number, there was a guy offering to buy low numbers. I had not doubt he was going to buy the 8 ticket limit. He wasn't a fan, he was a professional scalper.
U2 tried to sell tickets over the phone in LA, trying to route around TicketMaster. It literally disabled the Los Angeles telephone system for several hours. You'd pick up the phone and not be able to hear a dial tone (I was listening to the modem trying to dial in to a client site). It would take up to 30 seconds to get a dial tone, and good luck getting your call through anyway. Total disaster.
Taylor Swift sold out 2M tickets. I don't care what the time frame that was in, that's a boat load of traffic. Think not of the 2M they sold, think of how many were not sold. I think there are few companies that could handle that load, especially something as specific as selling seats A29, A30, A31, and A40 to Bob Jones. Let's see a paper on that locking problem.
The production company sets the ticket prices, TM sets the service fees, if you want to save on service fees, go to the venue. I'm not defending TM, they certainly don't need me, but it's been an intractable problem for a long, long time, at all sorts of levels. If you think TMs fees are bad, try StubHub.
>Taylor Swift sold out 2M tickets. I don't care what the time frame that was in, that's a boat load of traffic. Think not of the 2M they sold, think of how many were not sold.
Shopify did 3.1M sales per min last year during peek season https://www.shopify.com/ca/blog/bfcm-data. There's more contention for this use case, but I don't think this is as an intractable problem. I do think an alternate model like the post proposes would greatly help.
I think randomized queues are pretty fair. You give everyone who arrives within a certain time the same chance. This wouldn't be too hard to implement as a system either.
Say ticket sales open at 2pm. From 1:45pm, everyone who gets to the site gets assigned a random queue number. Then from 2pm, users are given access to the ordering system in the order of their queue number. We can even limit throughput with that (e.g. let in n users per minute).
Ticket sites in South Korea already implement queueing systems to control server load. When sales open at 2pm, everyone refreshes the page at exactly that time, but the request is put in a waiting queue. This can be considered randomized in a way (the time someone refreshes the page is somewhat random), but I'd like to see the concept of "advance queue building time" added to that to reduce the stress of "I have to refresh the page exactly at the right moment." Give me a few minutes to get to the queue.
$75 was a bit of money to be sure.
Back then you waited outside record stores to buy tickets. You'd line up, and sometime before the sale, they'd come out and hand out numbers, say 1 to 100. Then you'd sort by the number. Then they'd come out and say "We're starting the line at 37". 37 would be the front of the line, everyone else would sort behind that, wrapping around at the back. #36 would be the last in line.
When I went to buy Tommy tickets, they were also selling another acts tickets.
Since the tickets were so expensive, I went out of my way to go to a lower income neighborhood with the hope that there would be less folks in line to buy tickets, simply due to the price.
In the end, I got my ticket and the lady behind me did not. If they weren't selling the other act, maybe she would have made it.
When the Rolling Stones with Guns and Roses in LA went on sale, they gave out wristbands days in advance. My spot in line was around the building, the first show was sold out before I got there. The seats I did get were basically lousy when I did get them. That took an afternoon.
When I went to buy tickets at the venue, they handed out numbers, but they didn't scramble them. The numbers were random, but #1 was first in line. As soon as I got my number, there was a guy offering to buy low numbers. I had not doubt he was going to buy the 8 ticket limit. He wasn't a fan, he was a professional scalper.
U2 tried to sell tickets over the phone in LA, trying to route around TicketMaster. It literally disabled the Los Angeles telephone system for several hours. You'd pick up the phone and not be able to hear a dial tone (I was listening to the modem trying to dial in to a client site). It would take up to 30 seconds to get a dial tone, and good luck getting your call through anyway. Total disaster.
Taylor Swift sold out 2M tickets. I don't care what the time frame that was in, that's a boat load of traffic. Think not of the 2M they sold, think of how many were not sold. I think there are few companies that could handle that load, especially something as specific as selling seats A29, A30, A31, and A40 to Bob Jones. Let's see a paper on that locking problem.
The production company sets the ticket prices, TM sets the service fees, if you want to save on service fees, go to the venue. I'm not defending TM, they certainly don't need me, but it's been an intractable problem for a long, long time, at all sorts of levels. If you think TMs fees are bad, try StubHub.