Ticketing systems and how everyone is unhappy with them.
2026 Day 74. #TechDays.
With a recent terrible booking experience this is something I wanted to bring to the forefront. With so many concerts, music festivals around the corner it has been painful for so many people. Even still people end up on online queues, with little to no transparency and try to work with broken systems. What can we actually do to fix this?
Anyone that hosts such a ticker sale has no incentive to make it more transparent. Someone will end up buying the tickets. It is obvious for bigger festivals that the limited tickets will most likely sell out. So it is important for them to get the ticketing portal working but need for transparency. Tickets will sell out either way. Maybe you will get to go instead of me, but the organisers will get their share of the sales.
A nice UI that I saw recently was that I was given a queue number. As the number died down I could estimate if I even had a chance or when I would get into the shop. This is much more informative than “You are in line for the tickets”. How hard can it be to generate queue numbers concurrently?
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And what of scalpers and the resale market?
Why does a resale market exist for tickets?
One answer would be the fans who are ready to pay extra. The other answer would be scalpers who buy with the sole intention of making a profit. Here is an excellent article on this. The article talks about how we can limit the resales of tickets to make sure they are not sold at inflated prices, are only transferred on a verified market at cost price. A few companies do implement this system. Others do not because of corporate greed. Ticketing companies and promoters own their legit platforms to market and sell tickets. Some now own resale platforms. The majority of the money is made by charging a service fee. In case of a resale they get to charge it thrice. Once when Person A buys them, once when Person A lists them for resale, and once when Person B buys the resale ticket. Any more resales mean only more money for the ticketing company. Person A feels they made a profit because it sold it for much higher, Person B feels happier because they get to see their favourite artist. The biggest losers are the people at large but most do not see this. Resales are so normalised that some are preparing to buy at resale prices before the original sale has not even begun.
Ticket sales are more of a nuisance than anything now. Everything is a long queue, scalpers and bots looking for resale values, inflated prices that offer little value for money, overcrowded festivals, and mismanagement.
People often look over these challenges because of various reasons. But it is in the best interest of us all to demand more transparency and better experiences. This is impossible to achieve because us as people will never unite for such issues. The best we can hope for is legislation, but then again, politicians rarely do good for the betterment of their subjects.
See you tomorrow.
