Music/Sports venue ticketing APIs?

[evanowens]

I'm looking to get access to or at least documentation on open ticketing systems in use by music/sports venues. I know that ticketmaster at one point supported a venue info API (resful), but they have discontinued support.

If not open, I would be willing to pay to get access to a ticketing system (SOAP, Rest, etc. is fine). Thanks!

[kochbeck]

Not sure how helpful this is, but I ran the development of Live Nation's site before the TM merger.

The key systems you're probably looking for access to are TM Classic, TM Archtics, and the Paciolan platform, all of which are owned by Live Nation Worldwide now.

Classic has historically been the primary ticketing platform for concerts and events, while Archtics is a newer (i.e., not written in VAX Assembler) platform designed to be more extensible for sports ticketing packaging. Paciolan is a separate system that was licensed by venues so they could run their own ticketing system. TM bought them out a few years ago.

The good news: most Paciolan systems are still out in the field, and the system itself is fairly well-documented, so if you contact the internal ticketing agent for a Paciolan venue, odds are good they can give you access to the API.

The bad news: Classic and Archtics are very, very closed. Classic is actually a green-screen application that's been adapted to the web and whatever else. For the most part, the backend still thinks it's talking to a tty. Archtics is somewhat less ancient - I guess it's only 15 years old now. But it, too, isn't really current by any stretch of the imagination.

At LN, we were TM's biggest customer by a mile, and even we couldn't get them to give us decent APIs. So I wouldn't hold your breath. Plus, about a third of all venues have their systems out in the field, so you have to connect to them directly. On top of that, the promoters (the primary customers of ticketing) aren't too keen on the data being out there.

If you're just looking for venue information, contact Pollstar. They sell a well-maintained list of venues and important venue info.

If you need more info, my email should be visible in my profile.

[evanowens]

Wow, thanks for all the info! I researched paciolan recently and was pretty convinced they were running a closed system, thanks for confirming my suspicions. I also had a pretty good idea that TM was very restricted and inaccessable.

I'm trying to get access to ticket info in addition to venue info. Venue info I can easily get, but ticket info will be difficult. I've been researching how stubhub and other sites do it, but the only conclusion I can draw is that they have a financial agreement with TM to get access to their data, after all when you list a ticket on stubhub they need to verify the ticket ownership and validity (one would hope they do at least).

I was thinking of taking the yodlee approach by writing connectors that access dat through a series of API calls and simple HTML parsing, however there would probably legal implications to scraping TM sites, so no matter what, it would come back down to establishing an agreement with TM.

Any thoughts on this?

[dallred]

Stubhub and Ticketmaster don't have any agreements like this; they hate each other. Stubhub does not "verify" you have tickets, but they keep your cc on record, so if you can't make good on tickets you've posted on their website, they will buy comparable replacement tickets from somebody else, and take the difference from your credit card.

If you're looking for ticket info, it is easy to get for the secondary ticketing market. Get in touch with ticketnetwork, they have an XML feed of tickets from ticket brokers from all over North America.

[evanowens]

thanks for the info! any chance we could communicate via email/facebook? my email is [e-mail]. we're looking for some advisors/consultants with ticketing experience. thanks, e