Oasis’ reunion predictably overloaded ticketing platforms over the weekend as millions of fans queued for tickets, putting the perennially challenging ticketing marketplace at center stage again.
Disgruntled fans felt their beloved band sold out in more ways than one, using a controversial “dynamic pricing” method that overshadowed the rest of the on-sale, including the band’s own efforts to prevent rampant scalping.
The on-sale is yet another case study in how ticketing has become one of the most complex — and often unpleasant — experiences for music fans. Here’s everything that went right (and wrong) and what it all means for the live music business going forward.
With Oasis expecting unprecedented demand for their first shows in 15 years, the Gallagher brothers looked to put protections in place, hoping to stop ticket brokers and scalpers from gouging fans with extreme markups on the secondary ticket platforms. They did so by instituting a face value ticketing exchange on the ticketing platform Twickets, declaring it the only way a ticket holder could resell the seats.
After the pre-sale had begun and seats were listed for as much as £6,347 (or $8,300), the band warned their tickets “can ONLY be resold, at face value, through Ticketmaster and Twickets. “Tickets sold in breach of the terms and conditions will be canceled by the promoters,” Oasis said.
Oasis join the likes of Pearl Jam, Billie Eilish and the Cure who’ve used fan-to-fan exchanges and restricted ticket transferability. It’s been predictably unpopular among the resale platforms, who’ve argued that limiting transferability cuts out competition and gives primary ticketing services like Ticketmaster unmatched control over the market.
Still, ticket reform advocacy organisations have applauded the strategy, saying that taking the profit motive out of the secondary market will stop scalping and help prevent fans from getting gouged.
While Oasis have repeatedly warned that tickets sold outside of the official ticketing services and fan-to-fan exchange ‘are either counterfeit or will be cancelled by the promoters,” that hasn’t stopped resale platforms like StubHub and Viagogo from listing them anyway.
As of this article’s publication, Viagogo has hundreds of tickets listed for sale across all of the band’s U.K. dates, some for nearly $4,000. In a statement to Rolling Stone, Viagogo maintained that they’re allowed to sell the tickets despite Oasis’s claims.
“Resale is legal in the UK and fans are always protected by our guarantee – that they will receive their tickets in time for the event or their money back,” a rep for Viagogo says. With the shows still nearly a year away, it remains to be seen when or how Oasis and the concerts’ promoters will take action on any of the seats listed on the secondary market.
As long as they have their tickets, brokers will likely find ways to sell them. As 404 Media reported in July, some scalpers have used hackers to get around non-transferable ticket software. The only way to make markups stop is with enforceable government intervention. Ireland, for example, completely outlawed the practice of reselling tickets above face value several years ago.
As of this story’s publication, Oasis’ Dublin concert is the only one without tickets listed on Viagogo. Viagogo said bans like Ireland’s “ultimately harm fans by limiting their choice.” “Prohibiting free market resale – as seen in Ireland – only leads to a surge in scams,” the Viagogo rep says.
Viagogo argues that secondary ticket listings are more directly tied to supply and demand than the primary ticketer, and in its statement, the company advised fans to be patient rather than panic-buy the day of an on sale.
“Demand will be at its peak when tickets hit the on-sale but it’s not a normal reflection of what tickets can and will go for,” Viagogo’s global managing director Cris Miller said in a statement. “Just this summer, tickets for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour in the UK sold on our platform for as low as £80 GBP.
Praise over Oasis’ ticketing stance was unfortunately short-lived. By Saturday morning, customers were fuming once again, cursing out Ticketmaster as they faced controversial dynamic pricing mechanics to charge more given the shows’ extremely high demand. Some seat prices shot up by as much as £200, or about $261.
Fans filed complaints to the U.K.’s Advertising Standards Authority, the BBC reported, with buyers claiming the ticket prices were misleading.
While much of the rage has been pointed at Ticketmaster, it’s the artists and their teams — not the ticket company — who set the prices. As Robert Smith wrote on X, formerly Twitter, of dynamic prices for the Cure’s own tour last year: “It is a greedy scam — and all artists have the choice to not participate. If no artists participated, it would cease to exist.”
In a statement, a representative for Ticketmaster further affirmed that artists set the price, and said platinum tickets “give fans safe access to some of the most in-demand tickets, while enabling artists and other people involved in staging live events to price tickets closer to their true market value.”
The company also noted that the price hikes weren’t algorithmically decided based on demand in the waiting room, but rather previously determined for select seats. “There is nothing comparable to algorithmic surge pricing in concert ticketing,” the rep said. “Pricing in ticketing is a largely manual process of adjusting a small portion of the available inventory, typically the most in-demand seats in the house, to prices closer to the full market value revealed in resale markets.”
To be fair to the band, even with the higher price tier, those seats were still going for significantly lower than what’s currently listed on the secondary market. Still, that’s likely of little consolation to the fans who question why they needed to hike the prices at all.
The price hikes are varied: production costs are way up, as are expenses for road crews, and yes, some artists may just want to charge whatever it is they think they’re worth.
Oasis aren’t the first artist catching flak from fans over dynamic pricing. Bruce Springsteen fans revolted after the Boss used dynamic pricing for his tour last year, with some tickets costing thousands. Springsteen defended the move in an interview with Rolling Stone, noting that the practice only hit a certain amount of the tickets sold and arguing that artists should be getting the extra money for tickets, not scalpers.
“The bottom line is that most of our tickets are totally affordable. They’re in that affordable range. We have those tickets that are going to go for that [higher] price somewhere anyway,” Springsteen said. “The ticket broker or someone is going to be taking that money. I’m going, “Hey, why shouldn’t that money go to the guys that are going to be up there sweating three hours a night for it?”
Even Twickets caught heat from buyers over the fees listed for tickets on their face value exchange. A viral screenshot showed a £138.74 fee to sell a pair of £488 tickets, worrying fans who questioned whether the face value exchange was extorting fans too. Twickets subsequently announced a cap on their fees.
It’ll likely be a while before any notable amounts of tickets show up on Twickets’ site, however. Fans only just purchased their tickets this weekend and given that they can’t profit on the sale, they probably wouldn’t be listing them unless they find out they can’t attend a concert.
Oasis’ online queues were predictably a war zone this weekend, with Ticketmaster once again becoming one of the top trending searches on social media as hordes of fans reported hours-long lines alongside technical difficulties that got them booted from the site as they tried to secure seats.
The issues weren’t unique to Ticketmaster, as both See Tickets and the U.K. ticketer Gigs and Tours struggled with overwhelming demand as fans got error messages attempting to access the frozen sites.
Critics say Ticketmaster, which faces a monopoly lawsuit from the DOJ, hasn’t had any incentive to put more resources into innovating its tech since there aren’t many serious competitors for Ticketmaster’s business. (Ticketmaster itself has maintained it’s poured billions of dollars into its tech.)
Putting up an on-sale for such a high-volume-demand event isn’t so simple, and not just because of the amount of demand. For a show with as much demand as Oasis, a ticketing platform can’t just open up the sales floor to every single potential buyer at once given how many people may try and snag the same seat at the same time. To keep the lines moving, ticketers have to slowly drip fans into the sales page, creating the bottleneck we saw this weekend.
The dynamic pricing strategy in particular has caught the attention of authorities in the U.K. who’ve now said they’re investigating the matter. Even Lucy Powell, leader of the U.K.’s House of Commons, said she’d spent “more than I was expecting to pay” to secure tickets for the show, per the Guardian, adding that she was “not sure how totally transparent” the on-sale was.
U.K. Culture Minister Lisa Nandy told the BBC on Monday that dynamic pricing would now be included in an upcoming meeting on consumer protection in the ticketing marketplace. Nandy called it “depressing to see vastly inflated prices excluding ordinary fans,” per the BBC.
From Rolling Stone US
