Music Industry

Will this company be able to make buying concert tickets easier?

Ticketmaster is by far and away the biggest seller of tickets to events. And while people have issues with the company (sometimes ill-informed opinions, too), Ticketmaster still has the best infrastructure, software, and systems for selling tickets.

Hang on. I direct your attention to VBO Tickets. This Silicon Valley-based outfit has been working on a queueing system that can apparently handle the kind of all-at-once crushes we see when everybody tries to be everything all at once.

VBO has been around since 2012 and has been incrementally working on ticketing solutions for small and mid-sized venues. They’ve also handled ticketing for one-off events like festivals. They’ve had some success, too. We can point to sales for a European festival where VBO’s software handled 140,000 buyers within 120 minutes with no glitches.

Here’s how it works. When a hot ticket goes on sale, there’s an initial surge in buyers. VBO’s software acts like a cushion against all that pressure, handling thousands of simultaneous requests by automatically putting everyone in an orderly queue while also eliminating bot attacks. An orderly queue means no website crashes because of high demand.

VBO estimates that it can process about 2,000 ticket transactions per minute, meaning that a 20,000-seat venue can sell out in roughly twenty minutes.

The company is still a long way from handling the kind of crush we saw with Taylor Swift last November, but they’re working on it. Meanwhile, you know that Ticketmaster is constantly working to beef up its system to prevent future crashes.

More here. And then there’s this.

Alan Cross

is an internationally known broadcaster, interviewer, writer, consultant, blogger and speaker. In his 40+ 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.

Alan Cross has 39635 posts and counting. See all posts by Alan Cross

One thought on “Will this company be able to make buying concert tickets easier?

  • You lost me at ” Silicon Valley-based outfit “

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.