Ticket inventory snapshot protocol

Status and interpretation

Live Index Performance Estimate — not reported box office. This version 1.0.0 protocol defines what Live Index will accept before publishing an estimate; it is not a claim that observations have already been collected or that the protocol has been validated against actual settlements. No estimate rows are released with this document. A method can establish a reproducible decision rule without establishing any particular show’s attendance, gross, sellout status or promoter profit.

Observation unit

A snapshot is what an authorized primary ticketing page displayed for one event at one timestamp under one access condition. Store the full event identity, source URL, UTC observation time, local event date, sales phase and any authentication or presale condition. A snapshot of a presale and a later general sale are separate observations. Record which sections or inventory categories were visible; absence from the screen is not a transaction.

State vocabulary

• Available: explicitly offered for purchase in the observed primary sales channel. Preserve seat or section and displayed price where the page provides them.
• Unavailable: not offered at observation time. Unless the source distinguishes a sale from a hold or kill, this state cannot be relabeled sold.
• Held or killed: use only when a primary source explicitly identifies the state. Production allocation, sponsor allocation and accessible inventory cannot be inferred from color or map position.
• Not observed: sections hidden behind access rules, missing layouts or failed requests. Store a limitation, never zero inventory or zero demand.

Capture and provenance

Preserve enough authorized observation evidence for a reviewer to reconstruct the displayed state, subject to the source’s terms and privacy requirements. Do not bypass access controls, harvest personal information or make continuous scraping a condition of this protocol. A failed page, anti-bot response or loading animation is a failed observation, not a price or inventory measurement. The dated source ledger must distinguish a page retrieval from the observation timestamp.

Reading change over time

A decline in visible availability can reflect sales, changing holds, production changes, price-tier changes or temporary carts. A later release can increase availability even after strong demand. Compare only matching layouts and access phases and preserve unresolved state changes as uncertainty. A snapshot cannot reveal refunded tickets, complimentary allocations, private group sales or final settlement. Multiple dates help describe visible change, but do not convert unavailable inventory into paid attendance without an independently reconciled manifest.

Release gate

Publication requires a dated primary ticket-inventory observation, a venue configuration source, primary price-band evidence, promoter and ticketing evidence, a confidence classification and a record-specific limitations statement. A later reading is a new observation, not an overwrite of the previous state. The pilot remains withheld from search and the sitemap until ten observations individually pass these requirements. Downloads are offered only for real released rows, never for an empty demonstration or synthetic sample. Inventory protocol, capacity protocol and price-band protocol describe different inputs; none substitutes for the others.