So apparently there was a problem with an onsale for Bruce Springsteen, one of about 4 concerts he does a year, and this came about a day after he did the halftime show at the Superbowl. LiveNation messes up an onsale for Phish and the only people who care are stoners, but problems with Bruce Springsteen during a depression is worse than the Beatles dissing Jesus. The problem was — in simple terms — a feature that was used with an incompatible feature. In simpler terms, a system error. In simplest terms, no RTFM. I must admit I am glad that my team’s software performed correctly. In a worldwide company with thousands of employees that sells about 150,000,000 tickets a year, its pretty impressive that this was the first onsale problem I recall in 2 years. A couple years ago I worked on a product that represented 1/3 of our event programming features, and it had a module that validated the data against over 200 business rules! But, that is what we get paid for, and we should rightly get called out on that.

What has happened in the media and in the blogosphere, however, is just amazing — expressing such an incredible amount of rage and ignorance i kinda get what it might have been like to be black in Alabama in 1950. The self-righteous hatred mixed with the unmitigated stupidity…blowhard Senator Chuck Schumer is even piling on, and quoting “Born to Run” while promising an investigation into our monopolistic, gauging practices. I am feeling sympathy for the people who work at the DMV or the IRS or policemen or my health insurance’s billing department. It made me think about why these are such disliked organizations: these people all stand between us and something we want, and to varying degrees think is our entitlement. People are pissed off that concerts cost a lot, that they have to compete with 40 million other people for 10,000 seats, that season ticket holders and fan club members and people who know people or have the connections or money to hook themselves up are doing so and they are not. They hate that live entertainment isn’t On Demand, that all seats aren’t as good as the view on TV, and that you can’t just press a button and see the show you want. They hate that we are better than anyone at ticketing so blast us as a monopoly, they call the contracts we sign coercive when like any business we give better deals to higher-volume, exclusive clients.

So much of it is just plain irrational and outside our ability to educate, its tragicomic all the spray we get. Ticketmaster’s situation reminds me of the character Hancock, which was one of the funniest movies I’ve seen in a while. And like Hancock, a lot of my coworkers are shaking our heads trying to make sense of it all. I have worked there for 5 years, after working for 4 startup companies in 6 years – its a great place to work. My coworkers are as smart and innovative as any I’ve had, and the atmosphere is better since we know that having an extra can of soda is not going to bankrupt us. VPs play ping-pong with junior engineers in the break room. Often a big company is criticized for not displaying enough brilliance, but brilliance in a bottle is easy, consistently good software delivered to a customer who pays for it is brilliant. I am humbled daily by some of my coworkers, more so by those who are left after a 10% force reduction. I have met our CEO and CTO; my standard for evaluating a person’s raw ability is by what kind of dialog they conduct and the quality of the questions they ask — our execs both excelled.

Most people do not understand Ticketmaster’s business model. Venues, artists and producers are our clients, and they are the ones who dictate the use of our features; the public is our customer. We provide a full suite of ticketing services to our clients including: marketing, distribution, collections, settlement, auditing, inventory control, and access control all available in a ridiculously flexible feature set. This is what the service charge covers, and these are necessary items to put on an event. Be it Ticketmaster or Jethro’s Tickets and Crab Shack, you are going to pay for these services in the total cost of your ticket. We are in business to provide a service and get paid; we’re not killing babies, or terrifying you with audits, or even demanding a $500 copay.

People completely do not or choose not to understand our fees. Some are outside of our control: facility fees, parking fees, fees the venue adds on because for whatever reason they did not get enough money from the act or the promoter. Some fees come with your level of service – the service charge is the base fee for our normal range of services, the processing fee if you talk to a phone rep, the convenience fee if you order ticketfast and print it at your house, and there are fees to use our Exchange product. I don’t see the problem, or see this being different from all the fees you get with a plane ticket, a hotel room, or using Ebay. People bitch about $9 on a $150 ticket, how is this different than Ebay taking a percentage of the sale price, with larger fees on pricier sales? If it weren’t for Ebay, I couldn’t have sold a ton of my crap far easier than on Craigslist or sitting in my driveway at a yardsale. If you don’t want to order online, want to stand outside a window, want to drive across town and wait in line to pick up your seats, if printing your ticket with no worry about lost inventory or the US mail is not worth $2 – $5 to you…go for it.

The fact is the stadiums are not as good at sales and will call – it is slow, prone to human error and theft, requires an employee who could be generating more revenue seating people or selling drinks, and is just a difficult exercise in customer service. On a small scale, they lose a little money providing these services in conjunction with using us and we lose a little by not taking our fee – its a loss-leader to everyone and part of the business. On a large scale, our clients know they are grossly inefficient compared to having the public use us, and would absolutely start charging fees if they handled all the inventory simply to cover the additional personnel. Movie Megaplex Sleepy Box Office Guy + Movie Megaplex Pimply-Faced Ticket Tearer Guy; Ski Resort Friendly Cashier Chick + Ski Resort Groovy Bra Lifty…you see where this is going. Fees = service. Epic Rides used to have terrible event registration and once their fuck-up cost me $20 or Beckie and I couldn’t ride 24OP after driving 2 hours, and they mandated a $5 donation to the event’s charity…eventually they contracted registration to Active.com for about $4, and got much better local support cause of the charities, and their events have been running wonderfully…when you go to a live event, you expect it to cost money, its an EVENT.

Some of the features that are available to the public from your service charges: fan clubs, auctions, exchange, lost ticket replacement, pre-sales, over 32,000 types of discounts and price levels, a full-service website, inventory authenticity, gift cards, any form of payment, alerts, updates, iTunes credits, and the machine at the gate that goes “PING!” Its easy to take this stuff for granted, except when you sit in a Will Call line for 30 minutes missing your show, have the website crash, or have the slightest concern about sitting in your very own seat. To the best of my knowledge, we have never sold the same seat twice. Bitch all you want, for the hundreds of millions of seats we sell a year there are an infinitesimal small number of mistakes. Compare that to the airlines or a hotel, compare that to a rental car company, compare that to your order at a restaurant?

Ticketmaster does not set prices. We do not determine what inventory goes on sale when, or how access to seats are prioritized. These are all decided by the clients. Some people hate us because they were unable to obtain seats, but this really goes back to the teams or the artists. If Bruce Springsteen wanted everyone to see his show, he would play concerts every night until he stopped selling out, and he’d be like CATS with a 15 year run on Broadway, he’d be Wayne Newton in plainer clothes playing MSG and the Stone Pony on alternate weeks if he really loved his fans. If artists were truly concerned about scalpers, they would use our new virtual ticketing like Metallica just did – a way of entering the venue via swiping the credit card used to buy the ticket and completely eliminating paper inventory. If teams were fundamentally upset about season-ticket holders reselling, they would scan StubHub for seat locations and void those customers’ tickets, like the New England Patriots did not long ago. The horrible things the public thinks Ticketmaster enables is out of our control and completely explained by understanding our business model – we sell seats, we serve our clients, we don’t make policy.

The flashpoint for the Springsteen blowup and the hatred in general is the secondary market, and the 10x markup for in-demand tickets, which appear on StubHub sometimes a minute after an onsale opens on our website. A scalper used to be a dude outside the stadium, who got his tickets by waiting in line or having bums wait in line for him, and he seemed a little sketchy and you worried about the inventory (ooooh snap), but he was still just a guy selling something you might want. Sometimes you wish you had enough to buy his tickets, sometimes you laughed when the game started and that greedy bastard was still hawking seats in the parking lot. But he was just a working guy, not really hurting you with business. The internet has enabled the reseller to reach a mass audience, and turned scalping into a big business where the scalpers develop contacts with season ticket holders, multiple memberships in fan clubs with access to presales, brokerages and other personal contacts. The scalpers pay people in India to bang on our website, and have invested in bot software to slam our site and generate more requests than any person could ever do. Some days 80% of our website hits are bot traffic. The listings that magically appear on StubHub at the start of an onsale have been ready for a long time prior to the public onsale, they just weren’t allowed to be publicly listed until the onsale began.

The internet has highlighted just how much inventory is resold, and how hard it really is to get for the average person by the average means. This is obviously just supply and demand at work, but the sense of frustration and entitlement overwhelms people’s basic notion of economics. It seems fair to everyone to be able to re-sell a couple seats they didn’t want since its their property, and it seems fair to make some money if its a popular event — but multiply that by thousands of users and wildly popular events and professional dealers, and people lose their fucking minds and start pointing fingers. We have an auction product, which has not really caught on, even though its enabling the same market forces in a more trustworthy manner with fewer fees – but teams and artists don’t like to be seen as selling to the highest bidder. How would that make Bruce Springsteen look, if only wealthy people could afford his events? Or rather, if he condoned it?

Last year during the Hannah Montana craze, we sued a software company that makes bots which bought tickets for brokers claiming they violated the usage terms of our website, many district attorneys tried to push anti-scalping laws, and for a brief window everyone liked us. From our business model, we make the same service charge either way – add firewall and anti-bot efforts to the services we provide for your fee. The clients and public can remove scalping tomorrow if they want to and instruct us to, by combing laws with client mandates and technology. The will is not there.

Like any good business looking to remain competitive, three years ago we developed our exchange product – a completely managed and trustworthy secondary market. Its officially endorsed by most of the major sports teams and is called Team Exchange. Rules can be set for markup percentage, and in some cases those markups are mandated by state or county laws. StubHub, to the best of my knowledge, does not enforce these laws. Last year we purchased TicketsNow, an established secondary market website like StubHub. As a competitive point and service to the public, we can 100% guarantee any inventory because its cross-referenced against our records. StubHub and their like will refund your money, but can’t guarantee your ticket is valid. Would you rather get your money back 6 weeks later after filling out forms and laying down the cash and going to the venue and explaining to your daughter why she couldn’t see the Jonas Brothers, or would your rather go to a concert? We also link to TicketsNow on our website when you search for tickets, along with links to a re-search using different parameters and links for email notifications. These seemed like good services to give the public more options and utilize our page space, but after Springsteen the public is convinced we had a conspiracy to push people to our own resale channel so we could make more on the marked-up prices. We do not post inventory on that site – its all posted by individual resellers and dealers just like StubHub.

Another popular conspiracy theory is that rogue Ticketmaster employees are scamming seats and reselling them. A question I always get when I tell people where I work is if I can get them seats. Its illegal, and just the hint of it would get me fired in a flash. Supposing I could, I sure wouldn’t sell them to people who knew where I worked, or who expected some kind of bro deal when I could get 1000% more selling them online after I risked my job for it! And I would just do a few per show, not enough to get noticed, so as not to kill the golden goose. This can not explain the thousands of seats for resale, since we have detailed auditing records and our settlement procedures are rigorously reviewed – promoters tend to notice 10% of their inventory gone missing like cops notice cars drenched in blood. The free tickets I do get I obtain just like anyone else gets through work perks – the marketing guys have some extras, vendor goodwill, or corporate promotions for under-attended events. If you want mediocre seats for WNBA games or indoor lacrosse, GA tickets to a Horse Show, or last minutes seats to the Phoenix Ballet I can be your sugar daddy. I’ve gotten 4 sets of 4 $80 Phoenix Coyotes tickets this year and have had to practically drag friends out with me – Genevieve has seen more hockey games than most people in Phoenix have any desire to see. The only marquee ticket I’ve gotten that was a genuine work hookup was a day at Jazz Fest in New Orleans, and we were there to support the rollout of our new ticketing kiosks which let you buy a ticket just like a subway token. People loved it – the lines flew along, and the venue needed fewer cashiers so had more staff for beer sales. While I was there I got to see Robert Plant on the main stage.   It was awesome, I have wanted to see him for about 25 years – if I had to choose only one artist to listen to for the rest of my life Plant and Led Zeppelin might very well be the pick.   But I didn’t really see him, I was about 50 yards from a giant screen that was about 200 yards from the stage crammed alongside about 10,000 other people. Instead of doing the same to see the next headliner Sheryl Crow, I saw a small band named Ozomatli from about the 5th row and had a fantastic time dancing and jumping around. Ironically, Ozomatli was playing again the next night at a cool little venue around the corner from our hotel.