Your Apps, Please

I'm going to date myself. When I first started attending concerts, you bought physical tickets. These paper tickets could be purchased in several ways. You could visit the venue ticket box during business hours and purchase them. Ticket would normally be available weeks or even months ahead of a concert or you could buy them when you arrived for the concert if it wasn't sold out. If you lived too far from the venue, you could purchase tickets over the phone and either have them mailed to you or will call (that's and old term for picking your tickets up at the venue). As the Internet became more prominent, many venues started to offer online purchases. Tickets purchased online could be either mailed to you, will call, or printed at home using your printer. These were the halcyon days of concert ticket purchasing in my opinion.

All good things must come to an end though. Attending concerts today is often a pain in the ass because venues have moved to using apps for ticketing. This idea sounds convenient on paper. Everybody carries their phone with them to concerts so they can hold them up and record the entire show to post on social media so their friends know they were there. Since everybody has their phone with them all the time, making the device the method of acquiring tickets and entering concerts only makes sense, right? Except some of us don't carry our phones with us all the time. Some of us like to actually watch the concert with our own eyes rather than filtered through a screen. But more importantly, not all of us use venue approved smartphones.

There are several major problems with apps being used for tickets. The first one I will cover is the combination of shitty technology and nonexistent customer support that defines modern services. Anybody who has had a problem with a Google or Microsoft product will understand this pain. Getting a hold of a human being at either company is basically impossible. If your problem can't be solved through simple online methods, your problem often isn't going to be solved. One venue I used to frequent uses AXS. I say used to frequent because AXS is a unique ticketing service in that they won't actually sell me tickets. You see, their website and app are both convinced that I'm a bot. Creating an account took long enough that one could legitimately write an epic poem about it. Once I managed to create an account, I couldn't use the service. Getting human support isn't an option. I did find their online support page and submitted a ticket thinking a human being would respond at some point. Instead, several days later, I received a link to chat with a large language model that was completely incapable of solving my issue. I'm calling out AXS in this case because it's my most recent encounter, but the same headaches are true of many ticketing apps.

The second major problem is the seemingly endless number of apps you need to install. Ticketmaster used to be the go-to app for ticketing, but they're a shower of bastards so venues rightly sought alternatives. This has lead to a seemingly endless number of apps. Each app also requires you to sign up for yet another service. Some services, like AXS, make signing up a tremendous pain in the ass. A few services, like Dice, make the process straight forward and easy. Most are somewhere in between. It wouldn't be so bad if there appeared to be an end to the madness, but like Sisyphus pushing his rock, we seem to be damned to signing up for new services and installing new apps for all eternity.

The third major problem, and this is the biggest one in my opinion, is that you need to own a venue approved smartphone. This means you either need an iPhone or an Android phone running the stock OS. If you use anything else, good fucking luck. GrapheneOS works in most cases so long as you have Google Play Services installed (I install it in a separate, isolated profile along with all the stupid ticketing apps). If you don't have Google Play Services installed, you're out of luck for many apps (including Ticketmaster). What if you use something radically different, like a phone running mainline Linux? Some ticketing apps can be made to run in an Android emulator with microG, but not all. If that doesn't work for the specific app you need for a concert, you won't get to attend that concert. The reliance on apps for ticketing helps Apple and Google maintain their duopoly over the smartphone market.

The old ways were better. Anybody who could afford the tickets could attend a concert. Now being able to afford the tickets isn't enough. You must also own an iOS or Android device, be lucky enough to not be tagged as a bot by the ticketing service, and have the wherewithal to not blow your brains out while you navigate the Byzantine account sign up process that many services utilize. Rubbing salt into the wound is the fact you don't have ticket stubs you can tack into a scrapbook to remember all the concerts you attended (for you younger folk, tickets at two pieces and the venue ripped off one piece when you got to the concert and you kept the other, which is referred to as the stub, and a scrapbook is a physical book you could paste photographs, ticket stubs, and other paper objects in).