Client Services Director Katie Robinson details her struggles in trying to buy 2024’s hottest tickets:
Instead of spending my Saturday morning having a relaxing breakfast with my family, I joined the millions of people across the country and around the world, trying to get tickets to Oasis.
Whilst I’m no stranger to the intensity of purchasing hotly anticipated tickets – indeed I have my own process and ‘proven method’ of success. This is the first time I have tried and failed.
Using multiple browsers and devices (with separate accounts) I found myself ‘queuing to join the queue’ just to access the TicketMaster website via my desktop.
On my mobile I ran into various error screens, including being accused of being a ‘bot’ and pushed out. I eventually made it to the real ‘queue’ only to find that 300,000 other people had made it there before me. Even the distraction of housework didn’t make up for the sheer waste of time spent watching the number drop down as people gave up hope – indeed when lunchtime arrived, I too had given up.
Perhaps a different ticketing provider would work? Sadly not; Gigs & Tours kindly refreshed the screen for me, until it too gave up and ‘timed out’.
So, other than possibly getting carried away with the hype and losing hours of my Saturday, what have I learnt? Well, if all of the social media feeds are to be believed – then the ticketing providers ‘should have anticipated this’ and ‘have better systems’ in place. However, working in the world of websites and systems, I know that it’s really not that simple. The sheer level of demand on these servers and databases all at one time means that it’s almost impossible for them to cope with that amount of traffic and offer a seamless experience for everyone. Throw into that the intensity of human emotion (and human error) with the panic of frantically clicking buttons and inputting wrong details – it is a useful reminder that no system is without its flaws – even the really big ones.
Others in our team also spent their weekend glued to their screens, credit cards at the ready:
Kris Parker, Account Manager:
Before tickets had been issued there were questions over the presale application, as it required users to opt-in to marketing in order to qualify – something that isn’t allowed under GDPR legislation. This prompted the ICO to state “Our guidance is clear and we expect all organisations to comply with direct marketing rules. We have received a complaint about this issue and are looking into it.” This, combined with surge pricing and high ticket resale, have soured Oasis’ long-awaited return to live performing for many fans.
The demand for tickets shouldn’t have been that much of a surprise – Oasis’ Knebworth shows in 1996 had an estimated 2.5 million people looking to purchase the ¼ million tickets available. Back then you could buy them by phone or at one of 16 local box offices (which only accepted cash or cheque). You also got a real physical ticket, so maybe the internet hasn’t improved everything?
As an account and project manager, maybe I’ve got to crowbar in some lesson here about management of expectation or pre-planning or something that I can then stick on LinkedIn. Or, maybe I should have just logged on earlier to get tickets. Maybe they’ll extend the tour. Maybe they’ll split up before their first show. Maybe? Definitely.
John Harman, Infrastructure Manager: We know that sites like Ticketmaster are no stranger to having large swells of traffic when new tickets are released, from a technical perspective the thought of architecting a system to handle over 1 million tickets being released concurrently where each can only be sold once and having millions of devices attempting to check which of those tickets are free simultaneously with each having multiple potential status’s is enough to cause a database administrator night sweats. Even aside their own system, there’s a multitude of dependencies such as payment & security providers who also need to be able to scale to accommodate. While there are tools to provide stress testing it would be almost impossible to design something to stress test the number of permutations which must have been going on in those servers on Saturday morning, no doubt there’s some engineers working out how to do that right now though, ready for whatever comes next.
