Ticketmaster has had a couple of good weeks. First they win a fight against RMG for using a “bot” to purchase tickets from their website (News.com (blog), NYTimes, Wall Street Journal), then one of their clients, the New England Patriots, wins a court battle against StubHub. These are two very large wins for Ticketmaster!
The first win, against RMG, now makes it very difficult (or at lease actionable) for a company to automate the process of buying tickets over their website. This levels the playing field a bit more for the consumers ’cause an automated process can purchase much faster than a human can, therefore grabbing many more seats. It also leaves the true fan an opportunity to buy the tickets instead of having to pay a premium to a ticket broker/scalper.
The Patriots win against StubHub is also significant not only because they have to disclose information about their sellers to the team, but it states that they have to do this because StubHub’s sellers are violating the Patriots terms/agreements on their tickets. It’s common for tickets to have a legal disclaimer on the back, and one of the things that it often says is something to the effect of “tickets can not be resold or used for promotional purposes”. And in Massachusetts, they have a law about how much tickets can be resold for above face value, and the tickets on StubHub violate that. So the Patriots wanted to know the information of who was selling and I’m sure they will take action against those seat holders… they have been known to have invalidated season accounts/tickets in the past :-(!
I could type about this for days, but I won’t. I’m sure I will write about it more in the future, but I have my own ticketing ideas that I have to get down on paper….