If you think people requesting tickets didn't affect attendance then you are not understanding how these things work. Let me explain to you how it changed attendance and why it will have further effects.

First these events are oversold. However, you can't actually have too many people show up. So not everyone that requests a ticket can get one. This happens in almost every industry. You are familiar with airlines and how they overbook flights.

But how many tickets do you give out then? Well first you try and weed out those who are unlikely to attend, then you assign a number of tickets based on the % you believe will show. The catch is that this is almost always done with AI systems not actual humans.

They look at past requests and fit that data to the present situation. A step change in the data from a new campaign will almost always make these systems fall apart. Like when a rare weather event completely messes up if flights are overbooked.

So suddenly the campaign was inundated with requests for tickets. First they will not be able to filter all these out. So now their data set of those who may attend is not the same as it was in previous rallies.

So now when the system tries to decide how many tickets to send out it won't send out enough. The percentage of those with tickets who will attend changed and it breaks their system.

What is hilarious is that now going forward the campaign has no working algorithms to decide this stuff. They are in the dark what to do with the next rally.

So don't believe the hype that the k-pop campaign didn't have an effect. It did, and it will continue to have an effect.

Now you may ask why they don't just invite everyone, after all wouldn't they want as many as possible? Not really. There are actually serious problems if you guess the number of attendees too low. Where do they stand? People are much denser than cars and they can break stuff.

Then you get to the biological problems. How do you get them all water? Where do they pee? How do you control when they get upset cause they can't?

Basically all the horrible things that can happen in refugee camps, can happen.

So you need to control how many will be there, and with any control system when you get garbage data in, you get garbage out. In this case who to send tickets to, and how many to send was garbage. And, they didn't fill the venue by almost an order of magnitude (inc overflow).