SwiftEZ

Home screen
Artist Login
Artist Interest Map
Updating a user's location
Search screen for users to find artists & interest buy
Firebase Screenshot w/ locations and email addresses
Authentication on Firebase

Inspiration

How often have you found yourself waiting for online tickets or any sort of event tickets, on the day of release to get them before they sell out? Probably a good handful of times. Nowadays, online queues are common, in which you wait in an imaginary queue for hours, waiting for your turn to order tickets. Recently, Rosalie and I were waiting for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour tickets on the release date to find a tens of thousands of member-long queue on Ticketmaster. Discouraged by the sight, we gave up looking for the tickets, and lost our chance at general admissions tickets for the dream concert we were looking forward to our last year of high school together.

What it does / How does it connect to the theme?

What if we told you there was a way to simplify this? Not only simplifying the process for consumers but also for artists. It also removes the overpriced and agonizing process of scrolling through applications such as Ticketmaster, where users can wait for tickets to be resold.

What Ticketmaster attempts to do is they try to buy tickets on the consumer end simply. In reality, they make it more complicated and a hassle to get reasonable prices without the cost of your sanity. We looked at this concept, and said, “how can we reverse this – how can we take this, but look at it upside down.”

So we thought it would be simpler not to buy tickets based around an event but instead base an event around the tickets purchased. We did this by creating an iOS application, in this case, centered around our inspiration, Taylor Swift, that implements a process we created called “interest buying.” “Interest buying” is putting money down to tickets of an event not yet planned to commit your interest to an artist in your area. Let’s be real – polling doesn’t work. People click “interested” all the time, making it an unrepresentative metric to determine where to host a concert. “Interest buying” uses an actual billing process to help people fully commit to wanting to go to the concert.

What are the benefits of purchasing tickets without even knowing where or when it is?

The tickets bought during the “interest buy” period will be significantly marked down, making it a larger incentive to purchase ahead of time. Plus, once the details of the event drop, the user can fully refund the tickets, which then go back through the system to be sold on the same app at the total price for the people who want to buy tickets after the event is planned and don’t mind the higher price. But how does the “interest buying” help decide where to host the concert?

The artist has their own view on the application that shows not only the total amount of interest tickets bought but also a highlighted 50-mile radius of all interested consumers from their home location. This radius data is then used to target areas where the most amount of people live in order to decide a venue that can host the amount of people in the area.

If a venue is ended up not being hosted within your 50-miles, the app shows your closest venue and gives you the option to refund your ticket purchase. You also have the option to refund your tickets if the date does not work for you, or if you change your mind. The refunded tickets, or tickets left to fill the venue to capacity, are then put up for sale again as first come first serve.

How we built it

Utilizing Firebase and SwiftUI, we divided up our tasks. We each made different pages like the Artist Login, Artist Interest Map, Audience Location Collector, and more!

Challenges we ran into

Creating the interactive interest map that displayed all the different audience locations and where they overlap was a real challenge! But using Firebase and the MapKit library, we created a system that took the locations implement from the location picker, the 50-mile radius circle populates the artist's map, highlight the area's with the most overlap.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Our interest map • Using Firebase to collect and sort locations • Location picker and artist picker

What we learned

We learned how to use Firebase to move information from the Cloud and to different users!

What's next for SwiftEZ

• More artists – Not just Taytay – we want to include all artists.

• More events – comedy events, conventions, and even Hackathons!

• More regions – Although we only feature the Bay Area, we want to expand to include every region with an audience.

• More factors – Adjustable location radius, weather, and sizes of nearby amphitheaters to help artists plan their more ideal and cost effective tours.