Anyone who sat for hours in a digital queue may already have reached the painful and expensive conclusion that ticket prices, rather than any on-stage shenanigans, will be the most dynamic aspect of next summer’s Oasis gigs.
The hype around the Gallagher brothers’ reunion will have bewildered many. Yet for tens of thousands of others, the chance to see Liam and Noel getting the band back together has proved irresistible.
So far dates have been announced for Cardiff, Manchester, Edinburgh and London next summer, with Croke Park in Dublin hosting two shows. It has been estimated that the tour could earn £400 million, with the Gallaghers each clearing at least £50m.
Promoter MCD initially said that the Irish tickets would be priced “from €86.50″, roughly in line with the cheapest advertised prices at most of the British venues.
But once tickets went on sale on Saturday morning, mostly via the Live Nation-owned Ticketmaster, it quickly became apparent that the “from” was doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Fans who did make it to the point at which they could purchase tickets were confronted with vastly inflated prices. What had been billed as €86.50 tickets became €415.50 - before booking fees were applied - with similar jumps in price across other ticket tiers.
This happened because Ticketmaster deployed what is known as dynamic pricing. This practice will already be familiar to anyone who has bought a flight, and helps explain why some passengers paid £30 for their seat while others paid £400.
But when applied to concerts - which are essentially one-off occasions, with a limited number of tickets sold within a narrow window of time, with the scramble for tickets creating a surge in demand - dynamic pricing can lead to shockingly rapid price hikes.
Oasis could have done as other huge acts, including Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran, have chosen to and refused to allow dynamic pricing to be applied to their tickets. That a band which glories in its working class roots and credentials didn’t think to blunt the impact on its fans is a matter between the Gallaghers’ consciences and their burgeoning bank balances.
The episode has opened the ticket industry up to calls for government intervention. Taoiseach Simon Harris suggested the Ticketmaster monopoly “does deserve probing”, while prime minister Sir Keir Starmer said “this isn’t just an Oasis problem” and that Labour will make sure that “tickets are available at a price that people can actually afford”.
Any intervention will definitely maybe have come too late for Oasis fans for next summer’s shows, but will be helpful if it brings clarity on the future application of dynamic pricing in ticket sales.
