Even phone calls were fine when I was buying tickets. Wake up early, start calling when the phones opened, and I never had an unreasonable amount of trouble getting tickets to something I wanted to see. To be honest, there are a couple facets to this problem and I'm not sure how you fix one of them. For sure, Ticketmaster fucking sucks. But also there's the basic issue that buying and selling tickets electronically opens up the floodgates for scalpers, and I don't see a simple solution to that. Even if you lock down the technical aspects to ticket distribution to prevent sales outside of the first party market (which could be reasonably easy to do), it's virtually impossible to prevent people from selling tickets for a profit unless you ban resale altogether. Pushing people into a walled marketplace and forcing all ticket sales through it, including transfers, to reduce profits might help but it'd be pretty difficult to prevent people from sending outside payments. And that walled marketplace would be expensive to run and ripe for the owner of the marketplace to abuse. Strong technical safeguards against automated bot purchasing would help but it's not going to stop a profiteer from paying a bunch of dudes in Bangalore a few bucks to buy up tickets.
The secondary market makes so much money for LiveNation now through their subsidiaries. It's not about stopping that market, just ensuring the capture happens. That's why all of these ticketing places are looking at the NFT markets with dripping maws. You can also set up easy payment channels and shit that let you "opt in" for a ticket sale, but _also_ have to prove you have the money. Now you've got a lock on sales before they're even sold.
I've been on some high level calls with LiveNation, and we've built some metaverse shit for them. They are all in on the NFT, smart contract ecosystem, where they can enforce resale fees, etc.
Everything from monthly backstage virtual passes to tickets to a virtual event that then turn into a souvenir of the event afterwards. They're really just experimenting as much as they can with the tech to see how they can leverage it. Broadcasting live shows into a virtual environment is pretty interesting... to the point that the guy running the mixing board can also control various in-world events from that mixing board. It's pretty interesting the level of real to virtual world integration we can do.
I don't know if anyone has seen Babylon yet (I haven't), but it's set in the 1920s. Mary Zophres is the costume designer. She's been nominated for an Academy Award 3 times. She has done wardrobe on a bunch of Cohen Brothers films, La La Land, First Man and others. She is the Costume Designer for Project Artemis, which is currently filming in Georgia. I had a chance to meet her and hang out in her wardrobe truck for a bit, while working as background on PA a couple weeks ago. She is very kind and just a really neat person. I hope she gets nominated again.
I am super excited about this: https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/st...les-of-amber-tv-series-adaptation-1235492097/ It’s something that’s been talked about and promised for years, and maybe now it’ll happen. If you haven’t read the Amber series, you’re missing out.