5 million people enter a lottery to see Eason Chan—will AI end the "ticket-grabbing era"?

Add crowdsourced testing promotional copy Add crowdsourced testing promotional copy end Add App-exclusive traffic referral

Dear music fans, when you see this article, don't forget to manually check on Cityline — the first-round lottery results for Eason Chan's 26 special recording performances were just announced this afternoon, and who knows, you might be the lucky one. Image | But I got the consolation of being eliminated by you

To introduce: this series of performances is not a traditional concert, but an immersive Live Album experiment of recording a record on site together with the audience. The venue is set at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts Opera House, which has only 1,181 seats. After deducting 10% of tickets reserved internally, with 26 consecutive shows, the number of tickets that can be released is just over 20,000 — less than a fraction of the 4.96 million registration applications. Image | Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts Opera House

In other words, the probability of winning the lottery is probably lower than the probability of running into Eason Chan himself at a corner coffee shop. Today is destined to be one person rejoicing and a hundred people sorrowing.

But whether or not you win the lottery is another matter — the ease of this "ticket grab" definitely ranks among the top in my life: spend a minute registering on the website, confirm the email, and a few days later just sit back and wait for the lottery result. That's the whole process. There is absolutely no need to set an alarm, burn incense and take a ritual bath, and mobilize family and friends to help out together like when grabbing tickets for The Weeknd before...

So then, why hasn't a fine civilization like the lottery system been popularized before?

If tickets aren't obtained by grabbing, how else can they be bought?

Using a lottery to allocate tickets is not common in China, but it is not without precedent either.

As early as 2016, Sodagreen's "Thank Heaven and Earth" concert adopted a ticketing method of real-name registration and computer random lottery. In the ticketing instructions, Sodagreen explicitly stated that this was to "eliminate scalpers"; in the following years, the Joe Hisaishi and Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra concert as well as Terence Lam's Hong Kong Coliseum concert both adopted a similar "register first, lottery later" model. Image | Terence Lam's concert adopted the registration lottery format

As for large events other than concerts, such as the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the 2010 Guangzhou Asian Games, and the 2020 League of Legends S10 World Championship, public ticket lotteries were also tried, and from the results they were executed quite well.

Looking at the whole world, we find that this system has long been very mature in Japan, and is even the mainstream way of buying concert tickets there —

Unlike concerts in China, which generally choose to open station by station and grab tickets separately, Japanese concerts often announce all performances in advance, and fans then only need to "fill in their preferences," that is, go to the website to select the performances they hope to see and the seat tier they hope to buy for each performance, then rank the applications by priority, and next is waiting for the final result: they may win multiple "preferences" in one go, or they may encounter "reallocation." Image | The "preference filling" interface of the e+ ticketing platform

Of course, this mechanism does not mean absolute fairness and no threshold. In fact, it has given rise to a "official scalper" premium business: fans have to pay an annual fee of several thousand yen to join the "fan club" in order to participate in the lottery for the first batch of "fan-exclusive tickets"; in some lotteries, they can even pay to buy more lottery rounds and winning weight.

But on the positive side, these premiums are at least legally and reasonably collected by the organizers, record companies, and artists, rather than fattening up scalpers as middlemen.

Not to mention that whether one is willing to join the fan club is itself a soft threshold for screening fans, which can ensure that some tickets fall into the hands of those who "most want to see the performance"; moreover, additional financial input can only increase the relative probability of winning, and will not, like the ticket-grabbing system, allow concerts to be privatized by money alone. Image | Weverse fan club verification

Coming to the dimension of technology and user experience, the lottery system is also a relief for everyone.

Recall that traditional timed ticket grabbing is essentially a DDoS attack artificially created by the organizers — millions of people agree to click the same purchase button at the same second, and the ticketing platform needs to purchase expensive instantaneous elastic bandwidth and load computing power from cloud service providers for this, and these high infrastructure costs will ultimately be passed on to ticket prices and service fees.

Even so, in ticket-grabbing situations for popular performances, what the vast majority of people see is only frozen pages, errors, a queue loading box that has to start over once refreshed, and the gray sold-out button displayed after the page finally loads.

There is simply no chance to make a move before being defeated by some indescribable force — nothing is more frustrating than this.

At this point we have to repeat the question from the beginning again: since the lottery system offers a better user experience, puts less pressure on servers, and can cleverly generate revenue in disguised form, why, before Eason Chan's Academy for Performing Arts recording performances, could we hardly find any "phenomenal performances" that adopted the lottery system?

The rationality of the ticket-grabbing system

The most fundamental reason why the lottery system has not fully taken over the market may be that the ticket-grabbing system does indeed have its economic rationality.

To use the currently popular "understand everyone" sentence pattern: if I were a music fan, I would also want a lottery, but if I were the organizer, I would also make you grab.

From the standpoint of organizers and ticketing parties, the first-come, first-served flash-sale ticket-grabbing system is the most efficient "money printer."

The expectation of attending the performance in person weeks later, the expectation of fearing missing the opportunity as remaining tickets rapidly decrease before one's eyes, the expectation of reselling for profit... in a carefully designed timed ticket-grabbing scenario, everyone has ample motivation to grab a ticket and pay immediately.

In this way, the upfront costs of venue rental, stage design, promotion, performers and staff can be quickly recouped, and the fact of a rapid sellout can also build momentum for subsequent tour additions and sponsorship solicitation.

Even if someone's payment fails, or they temporarily give up on buying, the platform can quickly release the inventory and let the next customer in line take over. And once you calm down and realize you don't have to go see it after all, the platform will also tell you: because of the special nature of the goods, no returns or exchanges are allowed.

As many people have noticed, there is also a highly profitable gray area in the ticketing ecosystem.

For example, to appear fair to fans, concert tickets are generally priced far below the equilibrium price, but on second-hand platforms, the final transaction price is often far higher than the face value.

The difference in between falls into the tacit profit chain shared by organizers, ticketing platforms and the secondary market.

In 2025, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed a lawsuit against North America's ticketing giant Ticketmaster, accusing it of knowing that "scalpers" registered large numbers of accounts to bypass purchase limits, yet still allowing these tickets to be traded at higher prices on its own resale platform, and even launching software called TradeDesk to help ticket scalpers centrally manage tickets from different channels. Image | ABC7 News

By contrast, the lottery system is of course very easy for fans, but one side's ease is the other side's burden — the ticketing party must set aside a registration period, clean up duplicate applications, draw the winners, and then wait for them to decide on the payment date whether to buy; if the winners' schedules change, they are financially strained, or they merely registered for fun, the remaining tickets must then flow into a second and even third round of sales.

In this process, the organizer's cash recovery cycle is forced to lengthen, and the platform also has to maintain a more complex ticket allocation system. As the rule-makers, unless the artist requests it, they really have no incentive to adopt a lottery system that carries a bit of a public-benefit flavor. Image | Jiang Entertainment

In fact, Sodagreen's lottery experiment 10 years ago was declared suspended after only one show. According to media reports at the time, the reason was precisely that some fans did not pay after winning the draw, causing tickets to be released again, and how to allocate this batch of remaining tickets subsequently caused considerable controversy.

Coming to 2026, Eason Chan's recorded performance is no longer a pure lottery system either, but more like some kind of hybrid system: tickets not sold out today will, in the second-round lottery sale on November 9, be sold to all winners on a first-come, first-served "ticket-grabbing" basis, thereby ensuring that tickets can be fully sold across the two rounds of sales.

Speaking of which, although the ticket-grabbing system is now a target of public criticism due to various drawbacks, "grabbing tickets" was once a bit romantic.

In the early days of Chinese rock music's commercialization, the holding of the "90 Modern Concert" once caused a queue more than a li long outside the ticket office of the Capital Indoor Stadium; before the Japanese ticketing company e+ invented the internet lottery pre-sale system "プレオーダー" (Pre-order), queuing on site to buy tickets was still a badge of honor for local die-hard music fans.

In the era before the internet was developed, grabbing a ticket to a hot concert might mean going to the ticket window at three in the morning under the stars, wrapped in a coat, and waiting until dawn with a group of unfamiliar fans. You might not agree with their goal, but you would still be moved by that passion — and that is precisely the soul of romanticism.

And when these fans willing to spend their time finally bought tickets, most people presumably accepted it too.

In a survey initiated in 1986 by Nobel laureates Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler and others, when asked which way of competing for tickets was fairest, most people chose "queuing," then "lottery," and finally, far behind, "bidding." Image | Fans queuing to buy Coldplay concert tickets | Singapore Eye

The reason is simple — intuitively, queuing is a good measure of willingness to pay, and our "wealth gap" in time is far smaller than our "wealth gap" in money.

Even in the internet era, "grabbing tickets" is still proof of "putting in effort": fans may prepare their personal information in advance, set alarms, practice their clicking speed, make sure the network is smooth, and even organize family and friends to fight together at the same time. After a series of careful preparations, if you really do beat hundreds of thousands of people and grab a ticket, it can indeed produce a huge sense of accomplishment.

But this sense of accomplishment may soon become a lost art — because our opponents are no longer human.

Perhaps since more than a decade ago, we have begun to accept this fact: many ticket-grabbing programs are competing alongside us. But as long as the number of people in the black and gray industry is limited and there is still a threshold to "using tech," then some tickets will always fall into ordinary people's hands, and ticket-grabbing will still be an activity that can produce rewards.

But today, AI Agents and Vibe Coding seem to have eliminated the threshold for technical cheating.

Even a student with no technical background may be able to call on an AI Agent with computer control capabilities (Computer Use) to grab tickets for them, or Vibe out an automated ticket-grabbing script capable of bypassing official risk-control mechanisms. In just the past few months, several ticket-grabbing script projects evidently written with AI participation have appeared on GitHub.

In the short term, ticketing platforms may still be able to continue upgrading detection mechanisms, but in the long run, the broad trend of how people interact with ticketing websites shifting from manual operation to machine agents will not change.

The result of the "tech war" will inevitably be automated systems replacing manual ticket-grabbing. At that point, so-called first-come, first-served can hardly be regarded as a reward for individual "effort."

Since grabbing tickets by hand speed has lost its fairness, why not let the lottery system and the luck behind it rule everything?

From this perspective, we have reason to look forward to and welcome more Eason Chans, to welcome more lottery-system concerts, so that we can calmly accept the results allocated by fate.

As for now, let me first wish you, who are opening the inquiry page, that you will see the line "Congratulations! You have been successfully selected in the first round of the winning registration." Statement: This is an exclusive article of Sina.com; unauthorized reproduction is prohibited. tech_web_article_v2015_block_bottom non-targeted 300*250 button 17/09 wenjing begin

non-targeted 300*250 button end