Can We Talk About Taylor Swift and Ticketmaster?

You know how I'm always saying that we won't be able to enjoy all the tech innovation until we invest in our connection? Yesterday I learned a new term called 'dynamic pricing', which may symbolize the absolute peak of our egoistic system. It basically prices tickets based on demand. So since a few million people hopped online to buy tickets, some ended up forking over $29K per ticket. The Ticketmaster tech team clearly wasn't prepared for the massive demand for these tickets - maybe it would have been if its system had been doing simple and straightforward transactions like we used to in the old days - like a few years ago.

I'm trying to think how much would have to go into creating a system that can handle millions of ticket sales at once, with the whole dynamic pricing feature running in the background the whole time and messing things up.

So from what I gathered from the dozens of news items and thousands of posts about this - most of the people who tried to buy tickets to Taylor Swift's latest concert were at it for hours yesterday, and still came away empty-handed.

Any system that is designed for people to trample each other will simply not function in the new era. And many of our systems are designed that way.

We need to start reading the writing on the wall. Any system that is designed for people to trample each other will simply not function in the new era. And many of our systems are designed that way.

It's time to start thinking about a better way.

We have Black Friday coming up and I was hoping to see people behave differently this time. But after what just happened with these Taylor Swift tickets, it looks like we haven't learned anything from what we went through together over the last two years. We're back to our old ways, but even more motivated than before to spend as much on ourselves as humanly possible!