When Garth Brooks set out on his Blame It All On My Roots tour, he wasn’t looking to add a few more zeros to his wealth. Instead, he wanted to make it about the fans. With the fans making his dreams a reality, he hoped to give back with a series of concerts spanning the United States. To make it better, he capped each ticket at only $155.50. A great price to see a country legend like Brooks, it appeared that bots still infiltrated the Ticketmaster sale. And when Brooks noticed the empty seats, he decided to give them back to fans for free.
The Blame It All On My Roots tour might be centered on music, but it was nothing short of an all-out war on bots. In recent years, the bot plague has become a debilitating problem for fans who want to see their favorite artists. And given that some singers only visit certain cities every few years, that concert could be their only chance. But for bots – it was all about the money.
Hoping to flip the tickets for a profit, some scalpers or ticket-broker companies felt the sting of defeat when nobody bought their tickets to Brooks’ concert. Not the first time, the individual behind the bots considered it a loss. But Brooks saw it as a win when he called to his crew, “Go up to the very top, let’s find 8 people and bring em’ down here.”
Garth Brooks Has A Simple Message For The Bots
As the crew went to find some deserving fans, Brooks explained how he watched those same fans fight the bots. “I watched you people on on-sale day. I watched you fight the bots. I’m sorry, I know it’s Sunday – I say f*** the robots. Let’s get real people down here.”
Bots might have the ability to snag tickets from fans, but the technology was quickly learning that it needed a little more power to take on Brooks. And for those wondering how bad the bot problem was, a study by Queue-it suggested that a high-profile sale could generate a line consisting mostly of bots.
What did the numbers look like? According to Queue-it, one sale generated 3.3 million requests, but only around 138,000 came from actual people. That meant roughly 96% of the requests came from bots.
Most singers and fans could do nothing more than call for action or criticize companies like Ticketmaster. But Brooks wasn’t just a singer – he was the one holding the tickets. And if bots wanted to leave those seats empty, he had no problem filling them.
(Photo by Heather Wines/CBS via Getty Images)
The post Watch Garth Brooks Fight Ticket-Buying Bots by Giving Their Seats Away for Free appeared first on American Songwriter.
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