Description: As the summer concert season approaches, music fans and the concert industry that serves them have a common enemy in New York. And in Russia. And in India. That enemy is the bot.
Source: nytimes.com
Date: May 26, 2013
“Bots,” computer programs used by scalpers, are a hidden part of a miserable ritual that plays out online nearly every week in which tickets to hot shows seem to vanish instantly.
Long a mere nuisance to the live music industry, these cheap and widely available programs are now perhaps its most reviled foe, frustrating fans and feeding a multibillion-dollar secondary market for tickets.
According to Ticketmaster, bots have been used to buy more than 60 percent of the most desirable tickets for some shows; in a recent lawsuit, the company accused one group of scalpers of using bots to request up to 200,000 tickets a day. READ REST OF STORY
Questions for discussion:
1. Why should concert promoters care how the tickets are sold? Whether by scalpers or by actual fans?
2. What do you feel is the best way to solve the “bot” problem?
Info Systems in Practice 