Former ticket broker here (spent 8 years working for one of the largest ticket brokering agencies in the NYC). The “bots” are not the reason why you did not get tickets today. To be clear, I do NOT condone or support the usage bots. However, Ticketmaster wants you (the fans/general public) to blame the bots, as total misdirection to what is actually going on.

Here is an example: Madison Square Garden has a seating capacity of roughly 18,000. That sound like a lot of seats - you should have a really good shot of getting some tickets, right? In reality, for an extremely popular concert like this, during the “general on-sale” you have about 1% change of actually pulling tickets (regardless of bots or ticket brokers).

How seats are sold/allocated (these are not exact numbers - just representative of how tickets are allocated): Total Tickets in venue: 18000 Knicks/Rangers season-ticket-holder access: 3000 Amex or CITI Bank pre-sale: 3000 VIP packages: 1000 MSG family/Fan Club pre-sale: 2000 Promoter/venue reserved: 2000 Tickets remaining for general onside: 7000

So 7000 tickets actually go on-sale to the general public. The average size of a ticket order is roughly three (3) tickets. 7000 tickets/3 tickets per order = roughly 2,333 people who actually pull and purchase tickets during the general on-sale. For something like a Bruce Springsteen concert, in the NYC Tri-state area, it’s estimated that a minimum of 200,000 people will try to buy tickets during the general onside. 2,333/200,000 = 1.16% change of getting tickets. Again, this is rough math - but you get the idea.

That means that 98.9% of people who try to buy tickets are going to get shut out. Ticketmaster wants you to blame bots and ticket brokers - when the reality is that more than half the seats are never available to fans in the first place. After that, it’s pure odds and luck. Even if you eliminated all the brokers and bots - perhaps your odds would double to say 2.5%. Still 97.5% of fans would be shut out.

Again, I do not support the usage of Bots and no longer support the ticket brokering industry. However, it is important to know how these things actually work - and to put the “blame” in the correct place.