Picture this: fans across Ireland and the UK wide awake at 7:59am, gripped with excitement and anticipation.  Following advice, the fans have signed into Ticketmaster and are now counting down the final seconds until the clock strikes 8:00am when tickets for Oasis are released.  With Oasis being one of the most successful and controversial bands of the past few decades, these tickets are not just in high demand but have a strong personal and monetary value.

As the clock strikes 8, the battle begins.  Before reaching the ticket purchasing webpage, Ticketmaster’s system begins to sort the fans into their virtual queue, comprised of two stages: ‘Waiting Room’ and the ‘Actual Queue’.  For those unlucky enough to be placed in the waiting room, the anticipation has already begun to transform into frustration.  Rather than providing an estimate of when tickets might be in reach, the waiting room offers only a vague indication of when fans are redirected to the actual queue.  After waiting for what feels like a lifetime, the fans reach the actual queue – but to their misfortune, this only feeds the growing frustration and anxiety.

Ticketmaster buries the information about how the ‘actual queue’ works, leaving fans believing that they are receiving a fair experience when in fact the truth is darker.  Fans were assigned placeholders as high as 300,000 for this ticket sale.  Ticketmaster works on a first come first serve basis, which means that the higher the placeholder, the more likely the fan blames personal factors like poor internet connection as a cause for this misfortune.  The real culprit, however, are the ‘queue bots’ which ticket touts will use to secure the best value tickets before genuine fans have a chance.  Queue bots are automated software that manipulate the code used for the queues prior to the sale.  This means that once the sale begins, these bots engage in ‘ticket sniping’ which is the art of jumping the queue to secure lower placeholders.  The lower the placeholder, the quicker the outs have access to the purchasing page and swipe as many valuable tickets as possible.  The involvement of bots became evident the previous day during the Oasis pre-sale.  A select number of fans were emailed a pre-sale code which gave them the opportunity to purchase tickets a day earlier.  A few hours after the pre-sale, journalists reported the tickets being listed on Viagogo at significant markups.  The speed and volume of these listings strongly suggest the use of bots, given that it takes a normal user more time to get through the queue, purchase the ticket on the primary website then input the information about the ticket they list on the secondary market site.

Whilst the above battle was raging, fans were unaware of another hidden enemy: Ticketmaster’s ‘Dynamic Pricing Strategy’.  Introduced in 2022, Ticketmaster’s dynamic pricing strategy sees ticket prices fluctuating in real-time based on demand levels.  Ticketmaster implemented this pricing strategy as a goal to defer ticket touting by reducing the ability of resellers to profit from setting the prices of their listed tickets too high.  In theory, this model should benefit consumers by offering a more accessible and equitable ticket-buying experience on the primary market.  In practice, however, dynamic pricing has achieved more harm than good, causing a storm on social media.

First, dynamic pricing strategy relies on the secondary market to gage the demand levels for specific tickets and adjust accordingly.  In the case of Oasis tickets, the overwhelming demand led to a sharp acceleration in the ticket-purchasing rate, triggering Ticketmaster’s dynamic pricing algorithmic to react during the live sale. The result was a drastic increase in ticket prices – with a general standing ticket soaring from £80 to £355 in a manner of hours.  For the genuine fans stuck in Ticketmaster’s queue, the situation was more severe.  Many touts, likely using queue bots to secure lower position in the line, were able to access the ticket purchasing page before legitimate fans.  Whilst the touts reaped the rewards, fans were misled into believing that the general standing tickets would remain at £80 throughout the sale.  After, in some cases hours, fans were redirected to find that the only option was to either pay the extortionate price for a standing ticket or give up on the dream of seeing the long-awaited reunion.  Fans took to social media to rage at Ticketmaster’s unfair practices, with posts signally that they did look back on their experience with anger.  With all the monopoly power, it has finally become clear that consumer welfare is not at the heart of this platform and instead only the profit received from ticket sales.

Experiences like the recent Oasis ticket sale are nothing new for Ticketmaster.  The platform has become notorious for delivering a frustrating and hope shattering purchasing experience to fans.  The issue of touts and bots on the platform gained widespread attention in 2022 when the site crashed during Taylor Swift’s ‘Eras Tour’ ticket sale, leading to the cancellation of tickets.  With minimal improvements since, it was only a matter of time until Ticketmaster caught the eyes of regulators.  From the controversial dynamic pricing model to labelling genuine fans as bots and blocking them from buying tickets, the Oasis sale was the icing on the cake for Ticketmaster’s increasingly tarnished reputation.  Just this October, tickets for Billy Joel’s new tour were going for £200, despite being restricted-view seats and once again pricing out genuine fans from seeing their favourite artist.  These commercial practices have prompted The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to investigate the legality of Ticketmaster’s operations.  These investigations consider the lack of transparency to fans around Ticketmaster’s use of dynamic pricing which causes drastic increases in ticket prices during sales.  The CMA are also looking into the pressure fans felt paying the inflated prices, since they were led to believe that this would be their only chance to secure “face-value” tickets.

The current view of Ticketmaster is bleak and there are hopes that this investigation will finally prompt government intervention to hold the monopoly accountable and bring justice to the fans that endured the gruelling Oasis sale.

 

Katherine Pittalis

Katherine Pittalis is a final year Scholar on the Leverhulme Interdisciplinary Network on Algorithmic Solutions (LINAS).  Her research provides a comprehensive analysis of three types of bots – Stream, Ticket and Social Bots – focussing on how malicious actors exploit these technologies to disrupt music markets and impact relevant stakeholders.  Using a comparative jurisprudential analysis of the EU, U.S., and UK, she evaluates the effectiveness of current UK legislation used to protect stakeholders from these malicious bots.  Her project employs Daniel Susser’s ‘Online Manipulation Theory’ and Richard Thaler’s ‘Choice Architecture Theory’ to assess the influence and impact of bots on the selected music markets.  Her project aims to determine weaknesses in existing UK private and public measures for combatting the harms inflicted by these bots and to present policy recommendations.  Whilst her primary focus is on the music industry; her findings intend to be applicable to other sectors as well. 

 

The featured image has been used courtesy of a Creative Commons license.