5 ms·

Look at them cleverly placing themselves next to prominent systems like the air traffic controller, while toting their millions of lines like it's some sort of

Look at them cleverly placing themselves next to prominent systems like the air traffic controller, while toting their millions of lines like it's some sort of accomplishment. For a business that really only needs to accomplish two things to make their customers happy: 1) print tickets and 2) stop scalpers, they do absolutely terrible at those 2 things. I don't mean terrible as in they do the job poorly, it's just that they care 0% about the user experience during the entire ticketing process from end-to-end.

kbenson 11y ago
> For a business that really only needs to accomplish two things to make their customers happy: 1) print tickets and 2) stop scalpers, they do absolutely terrible at those 2 things. Their job isn't really to do either of those things, and I'm not being glib. Let me explain: First, TicketMaster (TM) doesn't really want to print your tickets. They would much rather just digitally manage them, and let you use your phone to go the the venue. Non-digital media costs real money, and TM would prefer to charge you for the convenience of managing your tickets, or sending you a PDF. As a bonus to them, this lets you easily resell your tickets as a fan on their TM+ exchange. Secondly, TM doesn't really want to stop scalpers, at least not completely. This one is a bit complex, because portions of TM are definitely not scalper (i.e. broker) friendly, while other portions are. TM runs their own secondary market, called TM+, which is a "fan resale" market, in which they list ticket that were sold on the primary market (i.e. TM) for resale, with the benefit that since they were the original seller, they actually reissue the tickets with new barcodes and they are guaranteed to be accurate and work for entry. They are quite happy to work with the broker industry on this side, and will integrate with larger brokers to allow listings to be easily updated. Personally, I think the bad names brokers get as a whole are often unwarranted, as there is a lot of benefit to a secondary market that people often ignore when they see extremely expensive tickets, such as extremely underpriced tickets for events that bomb (or another date is added), and the ability to find tickets for an event long after it's sold out (without a resale market, you would have little recourse to see an event that sold out minutes after it went on sale unless you got your tickets right then). That said, there are some bad actors in this arena, which brings us to the following... > I don't mean terrible as in they do the job poorly, it's just that they care 0% about the user experience during the entire ticketing process from end-to-end. TM has a really hard job. I'm not sure you understand the scale of traffic they get on a popular event's main sale. They can literally sell out a 30,000 seat venue in seconds. Keep in mind, on a sale that's busy like that, there are often brokers (the bad actors referenced before) that are running industry software that leverages AWS/GCE/Linode/Rackspace, etc to access the main sale page tens to hundreds of times a second per instance during that sale to get CAPTCHA words and answer them. Since the CAPTCHA success rate is relatively low, they brute force it with many, many parallel requests. Consider that during peak sale season, there may be multiple of these large sales per hour, all set to open on the hour. TM is constantly battling these brokers by changing subtly how their ticketing system functions. It's not that they don't care about customer experience (although they do have enough of the market to not have to worry too much), but that it's only part of an equation that must also be balanced with insane levels of load balancing and queuing to handle the crazy load they see. Now, I don't want to give the impression that TM is without fault. They've definitely got their fingers in multiple industries here which historically have had quite a bit of animosity, and they are fairly good at playing the media and the industries against one each other while secretly assuaging them in the background. The fact of the matter is that you as a customer aren't their only concern and aren't their only business. They are actively balancing the needs of the promoters, artists, venue and brokers, because their business caters to all of them. Edit: Clarified scope of virtual server usage slightly.
smackfu 11y ago
Ticketmaster is essentially enterprise software-as-a-service: the people buying it (the venues) are not the people using it. From that perspective, complaints are not surprising at all.
- slg 11y ago
  Except a large part of the Ticketmaster system is back of the office stuff that the consumer never uses. It isn't only the system used for the end user to purchase tickets, but also the system that the venue uses for things like inventory and access management. Odds are if you ask people working at the venue, they will have just as many complaints about Ticketmaster as you do. The problem is that none of their big competitors (that I have seen at least) have really put together a product as complete as one that Ticketmaster can offer a venue.
- walshemj 11y ago
  Agreed I helped out a uk cinema system with their system based on the effective monopoly supplier's system. It was "interesting" in the Chinese sense but an absolute PITA to work with. And that's not mention the WAN linking the cinemas based on packet radio that blocked :-)
  - tantalor 11y ago
    > "interesting" in the Chinese sense What's that?
    - r00fus 11y ago
      "May you live in interesting times" [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_times https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_ti...
    - duckmysick 11y ago
      Possibly a reference to a supposed ancient Chinese saying "May you live in interesting times". "Interesting" here means dangerous and troubling in contrast to "uninteresting" or peaceful and stable. It's actually neither Chinese nor ancient: http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/may-you-live-in-interesting-times.html http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/may-you-live-in-interesti...
olalonde 11y ago
They used to have their own operating systen or something according to an article I read about Terry Davis though that time is probably long gone. Edit: found the article: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/gods-lonely-programmer http://motherboard.vice.com/read/gods-lonely-programmer
- SEJeff 11y ago
  So Denny Denker, the Ticketmaster chief architect, wrote a VAX Assembly language realtime ticketing operating system. He wrote it in the 70s, before things like TCP/IP were standardized, and they managed to virtualize it on Linux using a hacked up vax emulator[1]. They've tried many many times (when I was there around 2007ish) to rewrite it using normal things like C++ and mysql, yet couldn't manage to get it faster than a specialized realtime operating system. It was kind of hilarious when we moved it to NFS, as the operating system timed writes to the speed of the PDP-11 drive spin rate. When we moved it to NFS, the IO was 1000x faster, and the entire thing crashed. No end of jokes resulted from these sorts of "quirks" in our systems. Last I've heard, they've been slowly moving functionality out of the VAX operating system into a more traditional stack. Source: I used to work on the team responsible for the Linux servers that ran these virtualized vaxen, check the resume linked in my profile. [1] http://simh.trailing-edge.com/ http://simh.trailing-edge.com/
funkyy 11y ago
I have to agree to that. Once I have bought tickets, traveled 500 kilometers, stayed at hotel near venue. Once I got there, there was dozens of people confused about place being shut. It turned out that the gig as cancelled and Ticketmaster forgot to notify buyers about it. This was for one of the well known US bands, so there was a lot of people there. The reason of cancellation was sickness of one of the members of the band that was announced on other site also selling tickets a week earlier so only Ticketmaster customers were affected. Imagine disappointment. Also, I didn't get refund for tickets either despite requesting it.
cdcarter 11y ago
Actually, to make their customers happy, they need to provide high quality inventory and revenue management tools that tightly integrate with third party databases and systems, and allow their users to make strong business and pricing decisions based on their data. Ticketing systems are products sold to a presenter or promoter (or venue) and facilitate their business.

kbenson 11y ago

> For a business that really only needs to accomplish two things to make their customers happy: 1) print tickets and 2) stop scalpers, they do absolutely terrible at those 2 things. Their job isn't really to do either of those things, and I'm not being glib. Let me explain: First, TicketMaster (TM) doesn't really want to print your tickets. They would much rather just digitally manage them, and let you use your phone to go the the venue. Non-digital media costs real money, and TM would prefer to charge you for the convenience of managing your tickets, or sending you a PDF. As a bonus to them, this lets you easily resell your tickets as a fan on their TM+ exchange. Secondly, TM doesn't really want to stop scalpers, at least not completely. This one is a bit complex, because portions of TM are definitely not scalper (i.e. broker) friendly, while other portions are. TM runs their own secondary market, called TM+, which is a "fan resale" market, in which they list ticket that were sold on the primary market (i.e. TM) for resale, with the benefit that since they were the original seller, they actually reissue the tickets with new barcodes and they are guaranteed to be accurate and work for entry. They are quite happy to work with the broker industry on this side, and will integrate with larger brokers to allow listings to be easily updated. Personally, I think the bad names brokers get as a whole are often unwarranted, as there is a lot of benefit to a secondary market that people often ignore when they see extremely expensive tickets, such as extremely underpriced tickets for events that bomb (or another date is added), and the ability to find tickets for an event long after it's sold out (without a resale market, you would have little recourse to see an event that sold out minutes after it went on sale unless you got your tickets right then). That said, there are some bad actors in this arena, which brings us to the following... > I don't mean terrible as in they do the job poorly, it's just that they care 0% about the user experience during the entire ticketing process from end-to-end. TM has a really hard job. I'm not sure you understand the scale of traffic they get on a popular event's main sale. They can literally sell out a 30,000 seat venue in seconds. Keep in mind, on a sale that's busy like that, there are often brokers (the bad actors referenced before) that are running industry software that leverages AWS/GCE/Linode/Rackspace, etc to access the main sale page tens to hundreds of times a second per instance during that sale to get CAPTCHA words and answer them. Since the CAPTCHA success rate is relatively low, they brute force it with many, many parallel requests. Consider that during peak sale season, there may be multiple of these large sales per hour, all set to open on the hour. TM is constantly battling these brokers by changing subtly how their ticketing system functions. It's not that they don't care about customer experience (although they do have enough of the market to not have to worry too much), but that it's only part of an equation that must also be balanced with insane levels of load balancing and queuing to handle the crazy load they see. Now, I don't want to give the impression that TM is without fault. They've definitely got their fingers in multiple industries here which historically have had quite a bit of animosity, and they are fairly good at playing the media and the industries against one each other while secretly assuaging them in the background. The fact of the matter is that you as a customer aren't their only concern and aren't their only business. They are actively balancing the needs of the promoters, artists, venue and brokers, because their business caters to all of them. Edit: Clarified scope of virtual server usage slightly.

smackfu 11y ago

Ticketmaster is essentially enterprise software-as-a-service: the people buying it (the venues) are not the people using it. From that perspective, complaints are not surprising at all.

slg 11y ago
Except a large part of the Ticketmaster system is back of the office stuff that the consumer never uses. It isn't only the system used for the end user to purchase tickets, but also the system that the venue uses for things like inventory and access management. Odds are if you ask people working at the venue, they will have just as many complaints about Ticketmaster as you do. The problem is that none of their big competitors (that I have seen at least) have really put together a product as complete as one that Ticketmaster can offer a venue.
walshemj 11y ago
Agreed I helped out a uk cinema system with their system based on the effective monopoly supplier's system. It was "interesting" in the Chinese sense but an absolute PITA to work with. And that's not mention the WAN linking the cinemas based on packet radio that blocked :-)
- tantalor 11y ago
  > "interesting" in the Chinese sense What's that?
  - r00fus 11y ago
    "May you live in interesting times" [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_times https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_ti...
  - duckmysick 11y ago
    Possibly a reference to a supposed ancient Chinese saying "May you live in interesting times". "Interesting" here means dangerous and troubling in contrast to "uninteresting" or peaceful and stable. It's actually neither Chinese nor ancient: http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/may-you-live-in-interesting-times.html http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/may-you-live-in-interesti...

olalonde 11y ago

They used to have their own operating systen or something according to an article I read about Terry Davis though that time is probably long gone. Edit: found the article: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/gods-lonely-programmer http://motherboard.vice.com/read/gods-lonely-programmer

SEJeff 11y ago
So Denny Denker, the Ticketmaster chief architect, wrote a VAX Assembly language realtime ticketing operating system. He wrote it in the 70s, before things like TCP/IP were standardized, and they managed to virtualize it on Linux using a hacked up vax emulator[1]. They've tried many many times (when I was there around 2007ish) to rewrite it using normal things like C++ and mysql, yet couldn't manage to get it faster than a specialized realtime operating system. It was kind of hilarious when we moved it to NFS, as the operating system timed writes to the speed of the PDP-11 drive spin rate. When we moved it to NFS, the IO was 1000x faster, and the entire thing crashed. No end of jokes resulted from these sorts of "quirks" in our systems. Last I've heard, they've been slowly moving functionality out of the VAX operating system into a more traditional stack. Source: I used to work on the team responsible for the Linux servers that ran these virtualized vaxen, check the resume linked in my profile. [1] http://simh.trailing-edge.com/ http://simh.trailing-edge.com/

funkyy 11y ago

I have to agree to that. Once I have bought tickets, traveled 500 kilometers, stayed at hotel near venue. Once I got there, there was dozens of people confused about place being shut. It turned out that the gig as cancelled and Ticketmaster forgot to notify buyers about it. This was for one of the well known US bands, so there was a lot of people there. The reason of cancellation was sickness of one of the members of the band that was announced on other site also selling tickets a week earlier so only Ticketmaster customers were affected. Imagine disappointment. Also, I didn't get refund for tickets either despite requesting it.

cdcarter 11y ago

Actually, to make their customers happy, they need to provide high quality inventory and revenue management tools that tightly integrate with third party databases and systems, and allow their users to make strong business and pricing decisions based on their data. Ticketing systems are products sold to a presenter or promoter (or venue) and facilitate their business.