| Boxplot comparison shows ticket price variance across ticket types |
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3-day minimum ticket price over time  |
FRIDAY ONLY minimum ticket price over time |
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| SATURDAY ONLY minimum ticket price over time |
SUNDAY ONLY minimum ticket price over time |
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As a first-time ACL festival attendee, I wondered when the best time to buy tickets would be. Is it smarter to buy a week before the festival, or hours before the gates open? I turned to Python to find the hidden treasures in 2021 ticket price data.
For this project, I used StubHub’s APIs to request ticket information for the 2021 ACL Festival (weekend two). Starting three days prior (because the best ideas come in the shower), I wrote a Python script using task scheduling that makes API calls every 30 minutes to get the lowest ticket price and the number of tickets left. Finally, using the gspread API, it writes the data to a google sheet. Gspread tutorial here
- The ticket prices exclude fees, which could be up to 30% of the selling price, which fluctuate based on demand. For example, a $200 ticket could be up to $260 after fees.
- Preprocessing the data: Sometimes, an API call returned a 0 value for the min ticket price. After the scraping was done, I removed all rows with 0 values for the min ticket price.
- gspread
- schedule
- requests
- matplotlib (and more)
- Started scraping data earlier. Since ACL occurs on two separate weekends, with ticket prices being roughly similar, it would have been helpful to start collecting data before Weekend 1 to possibly forecast the prices for Weekend 2.
- Automated alerts when ticket prices or ticket supply dip(s) below a certain threshold
- Running the script on a Raspberry Pi