The war on ticket bots is unlikely to be won

“HAMILTON”, the hip-hop Broadway musical about one of America’s founding fathers, has broken all sorts of box-office records. Demand is high because it is exceptionally good. But this is not the only reason tickets are so scare. Every time the show’s producers release a new block to sell, they immediately get snapped up by “ticket bots”, high-speed ticket-buying software. The bots cut the virtual queue, manipulating and paralysing sites like Ticketmaster before real people can get a look-see. Jeffrey Seller, “Hamilton’s” producer, has called bots “computerised cheaters”.

Despite Mr Seller working with Ticketmaster—which runs software in an effort to stop bots—to get tickets into the hands of real fans, too many tickets end up on secondary market websites for substantially inflated prices. According to Ticketmaster, about 60% of the hottest tickets are bought by bots. A single broker, using a bot, purchased 1,012 to a 2014 U2 concert in under a minute, despite the venue limiting sales to four tickets per customer. By the end of the day, that same broker had purchased 15,000 tickets. Even tickets for free events, like Pope Francis’s visit to New York in 2015, were gobbled up by bots and sold for thousands of dollars on secondary sites.

Last month President Obama signed legislation which aims to eliminate bots and intends to slap hackers with hefty fines. Under the new law, the Better Online Ticket Sales Act, the federal government can also intervene and file suit on behalf of people shut out of buying tickets because of bots. The law has support from across the industry, including Stubhub, a secondary marketplace. Stubhub does not sell anything directly, but takes a transaction fee. Jeremy Liegl, a lawyer at Ticketfly, which sells and promotes music events, said during a congressional hearing that bots harm everyone in the music industry except for the bots’ operators. The ticket markups end up in the pockets of the bot operator, not the promoter, not the venue and not the performers.

But the secondary market, worth as much as $8bn worldwide, may be too valuable for virtual scalpers to give up. Federal law enforcement may be unable to hunt down bot-operators based outside America. And the scale of the racket is daunting. Last year bots made 5bn attempts to buy tickets on Ticketmaster, at a rate of roughly 10,000 a minute. A cold-hearted economist would propose a simple solution: make the tickets much more expensive in the first place.