Ticketmaster: Ripe for disruption
I find it interesting whenever ticketing makes an international headline and this whole Ticketmaster Taylor Swift thing hitting every major headline last week had me both ironically chuckling, wincing and also thinking.
Ticketing is my lingua franca, the industry I come from. Live event ticketing is as familiar to me as my favorite childhood stuffed animal – a worn out yellow kangaroo.
Ticketing was the first major tech industry I got into after college and I ended up staying, eventually leading product development, engineering and customer success for online ticketing at Tessitura for 15 years. (Tessitura is the leading ticketing platform for arts and culture venues like the Sydney Opera House, Carnegie Hall, Royal Albert Hall and nearly 800 other venues worldwide.)
When the first tour of Hamilton happened, we sold it. When HH The Dalai Lama spoke at major universities? We sold it. Kusama’s Infinity Room phenom? We sold it.
In the years I built online ticketing for Tessitura, I lived every rock, pebble and hair-whiffing meteor flyby (sometimes direct impact) of the ticketing on-sale… at least a thousand times.
My 10,000 hours are in building product for major online ticketing.
So. From my crows-nest perch as both creating the technology platform for the on-sale and frontline support day-of, I saw the direct result of every single technical decision we made (or didn’t make) as sentiment scores on rose and fell on social media and in news headlines.
As I think about the swift-moving tsunami that crashed Ticketmaster last week, I feel a particular kind of armpit sweat that only a few of us in the industry might.
And it has me thinking.
Why live event ticketing is so different from any other type of ticketing or ecommerce?
When most of us think “ecommerce,” we think Amazon or our online grocery order. Live event ticketing is an extremely fiddly, niche and unique type of ecommerce. Natively digital (even the paper Will Call tickets you pick up are printed out digital tickets retrofitted to look like old school share-and-tear tickets), live event ticketing is ENTIRELY different than, say, airline ticketing. Why?
Simple. There are lots of flights if the one you wanted is sold out. You want to get from Sydney to London but the flight you picked has no seats? Switch to a different date/time or airline and problem solved—lots more seats. You get to London.
But seeing Taylor Swift live for the first time since the Great Pause and after she’s released a ton of new music and there is a dearth of artists touring right now? Good luck. There is very finite inventory for Ms. Swift’s Eras tour and extremely high demand.
That is what makes live event ticketing so different from every other type of ecommerce and ticketing in the world…finite inventory + crazy high demand + narrow time window.
Unlike buying an air filter from Amazon, everyone wants Taylor Swift tickets at the exact same second on the same day. Even at the start of the pandemic when there were fan-like runs on air filter sales, you still eventually got your air filter even if you had to wait a few months. Not so, Ms. Swift tickets. You had one shot to get a seat to see Lin Manuel Miranda’s last performance in Hamilton. You have one shot to see the Eras tour with Taylor Swift. There is no such thing as “backorder.”
The persistent myth of “Selling millions of tickets in minutes”
There is a figment in consumer psychology that borders on superheroism– that all fans should be able to get tickets as soon as the event goes on sale. There is a similar fiction on the venue side. Venues routinely lean on ticketing providers to scale up so event sell-outs can happen in “a few minutes.”
Fact: Selling out a venue in a few minutes is impossible once you reach a certain ticket volume. And this remains one of the biggest myths about live event ticketing.
My friend and a leading expert in the world on ecommerce demand, Neils Sodemann (cofounder and CEO of Queue-it, the leading online queuing software in the world…who, by the way, provides critical wing support and deflection shield for major on-sales across ecommerce—from Nike, Apple and Amazon peak sales days to Beyonce) said it this way: “It’s not possible to sell out a venue in less than twice the cart timeout duration.”
Why? Because ticket buyers are humans, not bots (hopefully), and humans need time to look, click, type, think, select, fumble for credit cards or logins. Humans require at least a few minutes of cart timer runway (that little timer ticking down in the upper right corner of your ticketing page) to select and buy their tickets. Add to that that most ticketing venues want to allow that timer to be self-extended at least once for the slower buyers needing more time. So, assuming you’ve scaled the software and hardware wide enough to allow every single person into the site at the same moment (infeasible for the millions of Eras Tour fans in Swift’s case) you still cannot possibly sell out a venue in less time than it takes for all fans to actually buy tickets. It’s just not possible.
So… are the fans and media right to crucify Ticketmaster about this?
Sure. There has been lots of good analysis (quarterbacking) shared in recent days on this. My perspective is this: the ways TM failed were preventable. If all fans were forgiving them for were outages under single-day record high traffic pressure of all time, ever… I doubt people would be pissed. That is understandable. As it was, fans had an awful experience and the bait-and-switch messaging from Ticketmaster that there would be SOME kind of sale following the presale… oops…no never mind… we are out of inventory… WAS indeed utterly preventable just bad business.
With all customer service (and all technology is just customer service of some kind), there are good moves and bad moves that make or break the customer experience. The pith learning I have from living thousands of on-sales as a major online ticketing provider, is this: always tell the freakin truth. Always. And do it as soon as you have it. Don’t massage the message. Be transparent and be immediate. Set up the broadcast comms channel in advance and tell fans that you will be communicating through that channel for the sale. And then over-deliver. Over communicate. The worst thing is to let angry and jilted ticket buyers inform everyone else that there is a contradiction in your policy or a bug in your code.
People love to forgive. Look at the wider trainwreck of human behavior and how prominent a role ‘fallen-but-humble-now-redeemed’ plays a role in our collective psyche. The biggest problems encountered in business (and frankly with life) come from not being upfront and owning what is effing true and not doing it fast enough.
I know people at Ticketmaster. It’s too small an industry to a) not know people across the aisle and b) not feel tons of compassion for anyone having this bad an on-sale event. Without a doubt, there are good people at TM doing their best work. But one thing I’ve observed about Ticketmaster for a long time as a company culture—they don’t always tell the truth. They are not transparent enough with fans about fees. They are not transparent or fast enough with answers about technology and data. And they seem to act like they can get away with it over and over. That pisses people off. Rightly. No one likes a bully.
At the end of the day, buying tickets for the masses is still a one-to-one customer service experience. It better be if you want to make customers happy.
Future of online ticket sales, according to me
I do wonder what would happen if we remove the artificial constraint of the on-sale ticketing model—too much demand in a single moment for too little inventory. Inventory should not change—there are indeed a finite number of slots to attend live events and that’s good for artists. Art is unique and perishable, after all. But too much demand hitting all at the same time? That’s artificial. That’s self-inflicted.
The key to selling two million of anything in a few minutes is to not sell two million of anything in a few minutes.
Instead, sure, let people jump in line at the same minute. Let the frenzy be getting your place in line. That’s much easier to scale than a full financial transaction. And then process the orders at a rate that insures everyone in line has a problem-free experience and knows exactly the odds of getting seats they want as their time at the front of the line approaches.
Verified Fan from Ticketmaster promises to do some version of this but there are always issues. This feels like a product redesign moment. Easy to say, hard to pull off (granted) but it is what is needed. As a fan, I would not care if I got tickets immediately so long as I could track my place in line, believe that place in line was fairly assigned and stayed consistent… was notified when it was time to buy tickets when it came time to buy my tickets, I found the experience easy to understand and, again, transparently fair about what tickets were available and why I was charged what I was charged. Just take the false constraint off the whole thing… the frenetic timeline.
I’m sure the millions of “bear-mauled” fans would have vastly preferred that to the chaos, the let down and now the scrambling on the inflated secondary market for the next weeks to find shreds of seat inventory for Taylor Swift.
To be fair, I’m positive that Ticketmaster planned for the tsunami. It’s their self-anointed role to handle the tsunamis. But as is evidenced, even the most honed, hammered and fitted piece of their entire technology stack (the scaling algorithms) failed to plan for chaos and unknowns at this level. And. That’s completely fine. Every company can get caught off-guard. Every technology has a breaking point. Just plan for it. Get ready to communicate well during it.
What perplexes me is that Ticketmaster’s response seems to lack a responsible operational and communications playbook in the event of exceeding break-point. Of all industries, high volume ticket sales platforms should be uber-experts in planning for exceeding break-point. They should be models for scaling in the face of utter unknowns.
High volume ticketing is like being in the insurance business—“larger than expected” impact is just part of the gig.
Heck, every well-run company needs a plan for what happens when they exceed their capacity to deliver. This is one of the great lessons of the pandemic for business.
Ticketmaster holds a business position that is ripe for disruption. This was a fail from my perspective. It is possible to plan for chaos and unknowns of scale better than this.
