Music Industry

Published on March 1st, 2019 | by Alan Cross

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New study says that 40% of concert ticket traffic comes from bots

Goddam bots. Those software programs that push aside us poor meatbags when it comes to buying tickets continue to screw with the marketplace,

Distil Networks–a company that specialize in “bot mitigation”– has dug into things with a new report entitled “How Bots Affect Ticketing.” They analyzed 26.3 billion requests from 180 different domains during the last third of 2018. Turns out that 39.9% of all ticketing requests were by these damn bots. So much for all that legislative work against them right?

I quote:

“Bots are leveraged by brokers, scalpers, hospitality agencies, and other criminals to execute a number of attacks, including denial of inventory, spinning and scalping, scraping seat map inventory, fan account takeover, and fraud. This unwanted activity not only leads to high infrastructure costs and poor website performance, but it also compromises the integrity of ticketing websites and impacts the user experience.”

Here are a couple of additional notes. Again, I quote:

• 78 percent of bots on ticketing websites are classified as sophisticated or moderately sophisticated, with more human-like characteristics that often evade detecition
• 85 percent of the bad bots launched against ticketing companies originated in North America
• 42.4 percent of bad bots report Chrome as their user agent

Goddam bots. Am I right?

About the Author

Alan Cross is an internationally known broadcaster, interviewer, writer, consultant, blogger and speaker. In his 30+ years in the music business, Alan has interviewed the biggest names in rock, from David Bowie and U2 to Pearl Jam and the Foo Fighters. He’s also known as a musicologist and documentarian through programs like The Ongoing History of New Music.

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