> For a business that really only needs to accomplish two things to make their customers happy: 1) print tickets and 2) stop scalpers, they do absolutely terrible at those 2 things.

Their job isn't really to do either of those things, and I'm not being glib. Let me explain:

First, TicketMaster (TM) doesn't really want to print your tickets. They would much rather just digitally manage them, and let you use your phone to go the the venue. Non-digital media costs real money, and TM would prefer to charge you for the convenience of managing your tickets, or sending you a PDF. As a bonus to them, this lets you easily resell your tickets as a fan on their TM+ exchange.

Secondly, TM doesn't really want to stop scalpers, at least not completely. This one is a bit complex, because portions of TM are definitely not scalper (i.e. broker) friendly, while other portions are. TM runs their own secondary market, called TM+, which is a "fan resale" market, in which they list ticket that were sold on the primary market (i.e. TM) for resale, with the benefit that since they were the original seller, they actually reissue the tickets with new barcodes and they are guaranteed to be accurate and work for entry. They are quite happy to work with the broker industry on this side, and will integrate with larger brokers to allow listings to be easily updated.

Personally, I think the bad names brokers get as a whole are often unwarranted, as there is a lot of benefit to a secondary market that people often ignore when they see extremely expensive tickets, such as extremely underpriced tickets for events that bomb (or another date is added), and the ability to find tickets for an event long after it's sold out (without a resale market, you would have little recourse to see an event that sold out minutes after it went on sale unless you got your tickets right then). That said, there are some bad actors in this arena, which brings us to the following...

> I don't mean terrible as in they do the job poorly, it's just that they care 0% about the user experience during the entire ticketing process from end-to-end.

TM has a really hard job. I'm not sure you understand the scale of traffic they get on a popular event's main sale. They can literally sell out a 30,000 seat venue in seconds. Keep in mind, on a sale that's busy like that, there are often brokers (the bad actors referenced before) that are running industry software that leverages AWS/GCE/Linode/Rackspace, etc to access the main sale page tens to hundreds of times a second per instance during that sale to get CAPTCHA words and answer them. Since the CAPTCHA success rate is relatively low, they brute force it with many, many parallel requests. Consider that during peak sale season, there may be multiple of these large sales per hour, all set to open on the hour. TM is constantly battling these brokers by changing subtly how their ticketing system functions. It's not that they don't care about customer experience (although they do have enough of the market to not have to worry too much), but that it's only part of an equation that must also be balanced with insane levels of load balancing and queuing to handle the crazy load they see.

Now, I don't want to give the impression that TM is without fault. They've definitely got their fingers in multiple industries here which historically have had quite a bit of animosity, and they are fairly good at playing the media and the industries against one each other while secretly assuaging them in the background. The fact of the matter is that you as a customer aren't their only concern and aren't their only business. They are actively balancing the needs of the promoters, artists, venue and brokers, because their business caters to all of them.

Edit: Clarified scope of virtual server usage slightly.