The Monitor is a the passage of the week dedicated to everything happening in the WIRED world of Culture, from movies to memes, TV to Twitter.
On Tuesday morning, Ruben Martinez Jr. he was looking at his computer, counting his chances. He was on a chat group trying to figure out the best way to get Taylor Swift tickets, and it looked like black. Everyone seemed to have 2,000-plus people ahead of them in line. Martinez, a developer at OkCupid, looked at the browser’s tools to see if they could determine his exact position in line. He thought he could get a percentage of how far he was. What he he didn’t I hope to see that it was the exact number he drew when he entered the line, 23,913, and the number of people in front of him who did not bow down or get tickets: 13,759. Soon, Ticketmaster he sent a message for those who are waiting it is queuing.
“So I posted on the group chat,” Martinez told me Wednesday night via email, “‘How long will it take me to add Chrome to show your exact place in line? More or less than it will take Ticketmaster to fix their mistakes?’
Creating the Chrome extension took less time. “All of that took about 40 minutes, which, unfortunately, was only a fraction of the time we were waiting in line,” he says. Martinez he tweeted about his work, open the add-on on GitHub, and submit it to the Chrome Web Store for approval, hoping that it will be available for all products that were then planned for Friday. (It was approved on Thursday, the same day Ticketmaster he announced was canceling Friday sales.) As soon as he finished, the Ticketmaster line began to flow. He and his friends got seats on the Eras Tour.
Some fans weren’t so lucky. “Eight billion people on earth, and every one of them is before me,” wrote another fan. Someone he pointed that Poland was hit by a Russian-made missile was lower than Ticketmaster. The site is said to be down for some users. Soon, the whole fracas became known The Hunger Games for Swift devotees.
When things started to slow down on Tuesday, Ticketmaster submit a statement saying that it had already updated some of its products and thanked users for their patience while “we continue to take care of this.” Meanwhile, The Guardian he noted that seats for Swift’s 52-year-old US tour were already on StubHub for more than $22,000 each. As a developer, Martinez understands that driving traffic from millions of users is a pain. As a fan, he is disappointed that concert venues are “paying too much and obviously not investing enough in their infrastructure.”
Martinez also said that the dispute over Swift’s concert tickets shows what happens when one company dominates the industry, something that caught the attention of another observer: New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Tuesday in New York the congressman tweeted“A daily reminder that Ticketmaster is in sole control. Its merger with Live Nation should not be approved, and it should be controlled.”
At a press conference Wednesday, Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti said his office is looking into whether Ticketmaster violated any consumer protection laws. On Thursday, Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota joined the conversation by sending a letter to the parent company of Live Nation Entertainment to express “serious concern about the state of competition in the ticket market and its harm to consumers.”
Indeed, if any fandom can lead to the renewal of the ticket sales monolith, it’s the Swifties. And if that doesn’t work out, Beyoncé is rumored to be planning a tour.
