I’m not here to defend Ticketmaster but there are some pretty interesting tech details in this article about what went down during the Taylor Swift fiasco.
Ticketmaster has provided a pretty straightforward defense of what went wrong. In a blog post that was temporarily deleted (and later edited and reposted) after Swifties swarmed it, the company said it believed that limiting the presale to “Verified Fans,” who had to receive a code ahead of time, would contain the demand to a reasonable amount. Instead, the post said, “the staggering number of bot attacks as well as fans who didn’t have invite codes drove unprecedented traffic on our site, resulting in 3.5 billion total system requests—4x our previous peak.” At an event that week, Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino said, “We invited a million and a half on that day to come and buy those tickets, but it’s kind of like having a party. Everybody crashed that door at the same time with 3.5 billion requests.”
If you’re into the economics of live music, the challenges for smaller artists, and how pop music has changed over time, I highly recommend this one.
