So this morning as I was madly refresh-refresh-refreshing ticket websites, trying to snag a pair of tix for one of the Arcade Fire's upcoming London dates, I thought to myself: is there no better way?! In this age of Web 2.0 everything, you'd think someone would come up with some kind of solution to this recurring nightmare. Major concert is announced. Morning of concert, thousands of fans and scalpers crouch over their keyboards and hammer Ticketmaster/knockoff websites. Servers slow, hang, crash, melt, or on rare occasions sustain the traffic. And everyone emerges from the experience at least a little enraged.
Follow me after the jump as I look at the only alternative I found - and ruminate on why it would benefit Ticketmaster themselves to support competing portals.
I discovered after the Arcade Fire sale had ended (i.e. five minutes later) that someone at the music community Bowlie has coded an AJAX-y web app that lets you check a bunch of UK ticket sites at the same time. It's well done, and useful I think - but unfortunately it's not really any different than sitting with several tabs open in FireFox.
As far as I can tell, Ticketmaster and the like aren't making things any easier. Their APIs are closed, the back-ends blocked off from enterprising web developers, and there aren't even RSS feeds to keep track of ticket availability. This seems such a big mistake to me. Open the floodgates to the hackers, Google Maps style, and the company would simply sell more tickets.
Let Upcoming.org, Eventful and PodBop sell big event tickets directly (instead of through referral links). Let someone do a clean, functional alternative interface for Ticketmaster - even if it eats into TM ad revenue, - because people will simply buy more.
Ticketmaster is rightly condemned for nasty industry practices, but at this point it feels like an evil that's not going away. With the open source community at their backs, dealing with them online might at least be not quite such an infuriating process.
And if they don't adapt... Someone else will.
(As for the Arcade Fire tickets? Opening night, baby!)
