It’s 9:59 am. You’re in the middle of your second-period class, Chromebook in hand, debit card out, hoping your teacher won’t notice you’re actually on the Ticketmaster website. You wait in anticipation as the last few seconds tick by. The clock turns– it’s 10:00 am. You frantically refresh the page, but to your surprise, the page reads “no tickets available.” Thinking there must be some kind of mistake, you refresh the page again, but still, nothing. A pit forms in your stomach. You quickly open another tab and begin searching for tickets on a third party website, but quickly realize that even the crappiest seats are upwards of $150 a ticket. Sound familiar? If you’re a concert geek like me, you know that scenario all too well. But why does this always seem to be the case? Well, frankly it all has to do with a number of different factors.

When you think about buying concert tickets you mostly imagine that your competition is the other thousands of fans out there who are just like you, right? Well, what if I told you that a majority of tickets get bought up by credit card companies, bots, and other various parties before the public even have access to them. Co-author of the book Ticket Master: The Rise of the Concert Industry and How the Public Got Scalped, Josh Baron reveals that brokers often snatch up 50%, if not more of the total tickets. Credit card companies advertise for their concerts and offer exclusive pre-sales as incentives for their customers to pay more for their premium cards. So unless you have the money to upgrade your credit card (if you even have one) in this case, you’re left to fend for yourself.

Ticket bots are another big reason why getting tickets can be so challenging for the general public. Big third party ticket companies will use bots in order to buy up large amounts of tickets within minutes of them going on sale. For example in one case, during ticket sales for a U2 concert at Madison Square Garden, a single vendor snatched up 1,012 tickets within one minute using bots. This practice, along with the number of tickets snagged by credit card companies and other advantaged parties, leaves very little wiggle room for everyday buyers.

So what are we doing to level the playing fields? Washington state’s Attorney General, Bob Ferguson, proposed a ticket bot software ban that was signed into effect in April of 2015. In December of the following year, President Barack Obama signed the Better Online Ticket Sales (BOTS) Act. This act allows state governments to bring civil suits against those who violate its laws. However, even after these measures have been put into effect, tickets continue to be taken up by bots. To prevent these scenarios, there need to be harsher and more immediate penalties for companies who continue to use ticket bots to force fans into paying outrageous prices for tickets they receive at face value. Regular everyday citizens already have a hard enough time getting tickets with other parties such as credit card companies and VIP programs getting first access. I think we all will agree that they should also have a chance to buy tickets at a price that is suitable for them. Ending bots would ensure ticket buyers one less competitor to worry about while purchasing tickets, and give them a fair price for their tickets.