NEW YORK – Following Live Nation’s settlement in an antitrust case over unfair ticket prices, the multinational entertainment company has announced that ticket buying and selling will now be restricted to automated bots.
The settlement resulted from a recent investigation, launched after Taylor Swift fans experienced chaos attempting to get purchase tickets the singer’s instantly-sold-out Eras Tour. This led the U.S. government to determine that Live Nation is a monopoly, a fact that has been a matter of public record for several decades. However, Live Nation says the problem isn’t being a monopoly, the inefficiency is caused by human people actually wanting to go to things.
“Our platform optimizes for multiple devices logged in at once and spamming the queue,” notes Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino. “Once ticket sales are live, that’s when the bots buy up the max tickets per person until they are all sold out in under 1 minute, though our software engineers are trying to get that down to 30 seconds.”
Rapino adds, “Yes artists send out codes and have fan presales, but we always ensure that all of the bots get those too, since it’d be really unfair if these hardworking robots had to wait until general sale day.”
Gesturing to a slide reading ‘Bots: A Better Fan’, Rapino outlined the ticket-buying experience Live Nation hopes to create. “Whereas a bot has never once called our customer service line sobbing, or filed a complaint with the FTC. A bot simply buys twelve tickets to a show it will never attend and immediately lists them on StubHub for four times the face value. That’s the streamlined fan experience we’ve always envisioned.”
Under the new framework, all tickets will be purchased within the first 340 milliseconds of going on sale, after which they will be resold through Ticketmaster’s official resale platform at prices that Rapino described as “market-driven” and a Department of Justice attorney described as “the entire reason we sued them.”
The announcement has been met with widespread support from StubHub, Viagogo, and a series of shell companies that, when contacted for comment, all responded within 0.003 seconds with identical statements saying they were “just regular fans.”
Consumer advocacy groups were quick to condemn the policy, though Live Nation was quicker to not give a shit. “Look, we understand there’s frustration,” said Live Nation Chief Fan Experience Officer Brittany Welles, who is believed to have been hired specifically to give this quote. “But when you really think about it, is a bot that different from a fan? Both are willing to spend $400 to be technically present in the arena. We see this as expanding our audience.”
When asked how human fans could attend concerts under the new system, Welles suggested they “explore the resale market,” adding that Live Nation’s resale platform charges a modest 78% service fee, which she called “part of the magic.”
Music fans aren’t surprised and have been left wondering how they can become a bot. Reddit threads with titles like Transhumanist Solutions to the Ticketmaster Problem have surged in popularity. One user in the r/TaylorSwift community reportedly incorporated themselves as an LLC in Delaware and began identifying as software.
At press time, Rapino was seen accepting an award from Rapino for Outstanding Achievement in Vertical Integration, presented by Ticketmaster, at a venue owned by Live Nation, with tickets sold exclusively through Ticketmaster.
