By now you've no doubt heard that thousands of Bruce Springsteen fans were shut out by marauding 'bots' or ticket buying programs yesterday. Even as fans kept trying to access Ticketmaster to buy seats for the upcoming shows at the Izod Center and the Prudential Center sites such as eBay and StubHub were advertising the tickets they were trying to buy for thousands more.
Ticketmaster acted surprised and shocked (again) saying:
"We anticipate and prepare for volume, but what we experienced today was a highly suspicious source of traffic, and there was exponentially more traffic than other similar days with major ‘onsales,’ " Ticketmaster spokeswoman Jacqueline Peterson said.
SO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT TICKETMASTER. We've seen ZERO ideas from Ticketmaster, who lets face it makes hundreds of millions of dollars really for doing NOTHING, on how THEY plan to stop this kind of thing in the future. Gee, you'd think they just didn't care until someone like Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-8th Dist.) comes sniffing around asking hard questions about Ticketmaster's business model:
"We’ve got to take a very, very careful look at the use of high-tech computer programs. While many fans were unable to get tickets today, many brokers were able to get their hands on good seats ... and put them up on secondary ticket sellers’ websites," said Pascrell, who will re-introduce federal legislation to improve oversight of the ticket industry.
Truth is Ticketmaster could give a shit. They get their money via the bots through resellers and that's what they care about. If Ticketmaster cared this wouldn't happen time after time after time after time.
Short of passing serious laws with serious penalties about reselling tickets say within 24 or 48 hours after they go on sale this won't change. Ticketmaster (and by association Ticketmasters own reselling arm TicketsNow), eBay, StubHub etc. are NEVER going to fix their business model for fans. They're not.
So Mr. Pascrell do your worst, get everyone behind you, pass a serious law with serious consequences and you know what, NOBODY will be on Ticketmaster's side. We've all been getting ripped off by them for decades. There will be NO public outcry over turning the screws on them. Right or left, Republican or Democrat we all enjoy going to concerts. It's a win-win proposition. It'd play REALLY REALLY well in an election year. Just saying. Ticketmaster doesn't HAVE to be a necessary evil.
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