Ticketmaster is killing the bar code in fight against bots and scalpers

Not too long ago, people used to line up at record stores early in the morning to make sure they could get tickets to their favourite act or a hot show. The resulting human- tohuman transaction was relatively orderly, limited only by the number of tickets on sale and the speed of the person behind the counter.

Once people began using computers and mobile devices to order tickets, the process inevitably turned to chaos as queue lines blurred and fans had to scramble before all the tickets disappeared within a couple of minutes. Humans were no longer just competing with other humans for coveted tickets, but also automated bots that try to cheat the system on behalf of scalpers wanting to make a quick buck.

One ticketing company has finally hadenoughofconsumers’complaints and wants to reinvent the process by using technology to create a new and secure way to sell that puts more tickets in the hands of actual fans, make the experience more personable and kill the use of bar codes.

“We have this first- come, firstserved model that is archaic and tied to a competing model that allows that access to happen at lightning speed,” said David Marcus, Ticketmaster Entertainment Inc.’ s Los Angelesbased executive vice- president and head of music.

“It’s created an environment that’s ripe for exploitation and what that exploitation has taken the form of is bots who are faster than any human can possibly be and who operate at scales hard to compete with.”

Ticketmaster stopped roughly five billion bots in 2016 through pattern recognition and other methods while “spending millions in dollars and blood” to do so, Marcus said, adding the company saw multiples of that number in 2017.

As the war intensifies between users and bots — and even fans and Ticketmaster since it often bears the brunt of complaints about scalpers — the company wants to change the nature of the battle.

Ticketmaster believes the key is controlling the pace of sales. To that end, the company recently introduced a technology called Verified Fan.

Fans have to register their interest in an event and then Ticketmaster’s machine learning analyzes each person to see who is most likely to attend based on how many times they have followed through on events in the past. Those selected receive a code and specified purchase window, throwing out the previous notion of one general on- sale time.

“What we are trying to do is slow down the process, but, also knowing that demand inevitably outpaces the supply sometimes, the question is how do we try to predict the propensity of that fan to actually go to the event as opposed to reselling that ticket for an opportunity of arbitrage, using the data science both us and the artist have,” said Patti- Anne Tarlton, Ticketmaster Canada’s chief operating officer.

Verified Fan was used on 65 tours in 2017 and Ticketmaster found the technology was right in selecting fans 95 per cent of the time, meaning those people actually used the tickets instead of reselling them.

The big test for the company has been Bruce Springsteen’s intimate stint on Broadway, which started at the end of 2017 and extends through to June 2018.

“The beautiful thing about Springsteen is that if we had not done Verified Fan, 100 per cent of the tickets would have gone to secondary market sites,” Marcus said. “There would have been no chance for consumers to get tickets, because the bots would have overwhelmed ( the system) as it was too scarce a ticket, too valuable and too huge of an experience for brokers to let it go.”