Ticketron (1965 - 1991)

1965 - 1991

dead us

a mainframe in a hotel basement and a terminal in a record shop meant you could buy one named seat in a stadium two states away, and the seat could not be sold twice. that was 1968, thirty years before most people had a modem. control data ran it for two decades and by 1990 it had seven hundred and fifty outlets against a competitor with more. carlyle bought the assets and passed them to ticketmaster the following year. the name came back in 2017 on a website with no connection to any of it.

~ the goodbye ~

i wasnt close to this part of the story, still, ticketron answered a question that Turkey answered with a queue. to be honest. Buying a seat for a match or a concert here meant going to a gişe and standing in front of it. that stayed true well into the 2000s, long after the country had broadband. for some reason. So this grave is written from the outside, about a machine that solved a problem in North America a quarter century before the internet showed up to solve it again for everyone else.

It was incorporated on 4 may 1965 in New York as Ticket Reservations Systems, funded by the Bronfman family investment arm. Control Data Corporation bought fifty one percent of it in '69 for 3.9 million dollars and owned the whole thing by 1973, which is the part that explains the engineering. Control Data made mainframes, the ticket business was a reason to sell them to somebody.

i was not paying attention by then, but anyway. The problem it solved is easy to state and was hard to build. for some reason. Two shops on opposite sides of a city cannot both sell seat J14 without one customer arriving to find somebody in their chair. Ticketron put a duplexed CDC 1700 in a room at the Beverly Hilton, hung terminals off it in record shops and department stores. made the inventory live. A seat that had been sold anywhere was sold everywhere, immediately.

~ the chronicle ~

Born	4 may 1965, incorporated in New York
Peak	750 outlets and 40 percent of the market in 1990
Killed	february 1991
Lifespan	twenty six years
Made by	Ticket Reservations Systems, then Control Data Corporation
Killed by	Ticketmaster, by way of a private equity flip

~ the machine behind the counter ~

The thing customers saw was a beige box on a counter next to the till, operated by somebody whose actual job was selling records. though, you said what you wanted, they typed. a ticket came outta the printer already stamped with a section and a row. There was no browsing and no seat map, only a clerk reading whatever the terminal had returned.

This was an online service in the original sense of the word, a network of dumb terminals talking to one machine, running commercially for a decade before most people actually had heard the term. Ticketron also ran the same setup for state lotteries, which is why the terminals ended up in corner shops in New York and Pennsylvania and stayed there long enough to become invisible.

~ the day it died ~

this part you had to be in the US for, and i was not. Ticketmaster started in 1976 and won on economics rather than technology. It paid venues for the right to be their exclusive seller and made the money back on service charges added to each ticket, which left the venue better off and the buyer paying for it with nowhere else to go. Ticketron kept charging a flat fee and kept losing contracts to a company that made venues an offer it could not match.

this part i kind of was not really around for, but anyway. but yeah, by 1990 Ticketron was down to seven hundred and fifty outlets and forty percent of the market against Ticketmaster's fifty. to be fair, the Carlyle Group bought the assets late that year, minus the Shubert Organization's Telecharge business, which was left out for antitrust reasons, carlyle then sold what it had bought straight on to Ticketmaster. in those days. the deal was done by february 1991. the competition was over about a month after the private equity firm walked in.

~ the next chapter ~

i wasnt close to this part of the story, still. What Ticketmaster bought was not the technology, which was obsolete, but the absence of a competitor. Every complaint made about ticket pricing in the thirty five years since traces back to a market that stopped having two companies in it in february '91. the antitrust case the US government filed in 2024 is arguing about the same thing.

this is mostly told from the outside. Ticketmaster sold the dead name in 2017 and there is a Ticketron.com selling tickets on the web today, which shares nothing with the original except the letters. in those days. The real one was a printer behind a counter. the person who worked it did not know how any of it functioned.

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »