PreferredSeat.com Blog

The notorious company, RMG, which took all the heat a few years back for providing ticket brokers with software that used “bots” to pull tickets for events and were subsequently sued by Ticketmaster may be out of business, but the bots are not. Not only is the same software still in use, but dozens of software companies have come forth with their own versions and have been hawking them to ticket brokers nationwide.

If you wonder why you get a “sold out” message or really bad seating in the first few minutes that an event goes on sale, then better seats a half hour later, may be in a large part because most of the tickets are being held up by software that lets the user pick the best seats from the potentially hundreds of tickets that the bot software allows him to hold. Then the tickets he doesn’t want are released back into the mix to be picked up by the dozens of companies using the similar software to hold the seats and make their choice of the best seats and leave the garbage seats to fans.

It’s no wonder artists, venues and Ticketmaster are against the bots and are looking at ways to eliminate the traditional distributing of tickets. There is more profit in that motive by eliminating the ticket broker, but by the use of bots, brokers may be forcing their hand and it makes a good argument for Ticketmaster to get the artist to change how their tickets are sold.

At this time I believe Ticketmaster has given up on fighting the bot software, there are just too many versions in too many countries to continue the lawsuits, so they continue to find alternate ways of getting the tickets into fans hands. Unfortunately for the fans, the cost isn’t getting cheaper, and the good tickets are even harder to get.