The most sophisticated bots can be programmed to make thousands of requests on Ticketmaster's servers using thousands of different IP addresses, giving bots another distinct advantage over humans.
TICKET MASTER TICKET CREATOR SOFTWARE
There are several different types of ticket bots, but the ones that anger Ticketmaster, politicians, fans, and artists are usually sophisticated pieces of software that can snag tickets the instant they go on sale by filling out Ticketmaster's dropdown prompts in a matter of milliseconds it takes even a skilled human at least 10 seconds to get through the prompt.
Now, he's out to expose the secrets of the ticket industry in a bid to make sure tickets are sold directly to their fans.Īny discussion about ticket scalping starts with bots, a mysterious scourge that people blame for buying up tickets.Ī ticket bot is a computer program that automates the process of buying a ticket from Ticketmaster or another primary ticketing website. Seven years after his Los Angeles office was raided by shotgun-wielding FBI agents, Lowson told me he's switched teams. The scourge of ticket bots and the immorality of the shady ticket scalpers using them is conventional wisdom that's so ingrained in the public consciousness and so politically safe that a law to ban ticket bots passed both houses of Congress unanimously late last year, in part thanks to a high-profile public relations campaign spearheaded by Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda.īut no one actually involved in the ticket scalping industry thinks that banning bots will do much to slow down the secondary market. The company fundamentally broke Ticketmaster, using one of the first ever automated "ticket bots" to buy and flip millions of tickets between 1999 and Lowson's eventual arrest on wire fraud charges in 2010. For more than a decade, Wiseguy was the biggest name in ticket scalping. U2 is one of dozens of artists that has addressed the fact that their tickets weren't being sold directly to fans. We took all the good tickets in that second round, too." "They apologized on the Grammys because of us, and then they had a second round of sales to make up for it. "When the sale dropped, we took 496 in New York, 492 in Boston, 496 in LA," Lowson, the former CEO of Wiseguy Tickets, told me in one of our many phone calls over the course of the last six months.