Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past week (in which case, welcome back), you’ll have seen that Manchester indie-rockers Oasis have reformed.
The Gallagher brothers, who haven’t played on stage together since their acrimonious split in 2009, will be reuniting once more for a series of gigs across the UK.
A long-awaited reunion it may be but, for fans of the band, the sale that followed was both stressful and very, very expensive. Ticketmaster crashed. Fans got kicked off the sites for being bots. And when they finally did get around to buying tickets, they cost around £350, per person, ranging up into the thousands.
It’s been a PR disaster: enough of one that the CMA has recently launched an investigation into Ticketmaster and the way it used dynamic pricing (which varies the cost of tickets according to demand: more demand, higher prices) to hike costs to two or three times the cost of face value.
For Oasis (who have vehemently denied being aware of the price gouging), it’s worth it. After all, they stand to make millions from this tour: more than they ever earned while touring back in the day. And for Noel Gallagher, who is facing a costly £20m divorce from his wife Sara, the numbers clearly add up.
To pre-empt criticism: Oasis are veteran rockers. They’ve sold 70m records, and they’ve been touring for years. They know how to put on a show, and they’re justified in charging high prices for that show.
The issue lies in the broken system. Ticketmaster has faced criticism for years over the way it runs its service, and it proved woefully inadequate for the job when the sale proper opened on Saturday.
The site, which is ageing, is prone to crashing – as it did when bookings opened for Taylor Swift’s monolithic Eras tour, leaving thousands of unhappy fans without tickets, or the chance to access them.
In 2022, it also sparked a massive backlash when it introduced dynamic pricing. At the time, the site said it was doing this to stop touting (more of an issue in the US than the UK) and give more money to the artists, but that didn’t help fans, for whom the price surges have proved astronomically expensive.
And has it really stopped touts? Secondary ticket websites like Stubhub and Viagogo, which allow fans to resell their tickets, are still very much operational in the UK and also provide a platform for resale merchants to go about their business. And Oasis tickets have already started to crop up on many of these resale sales – with the price tag on many of these exceeding £6,000. Though Oasis has since said any resold tickets would be considered void, don’t expect that to stop touts, or indeed customers from reselling tickets they couldn’t afford to buy in the first place.
Needless to say, the mood is combative – a fresh wrinkle that has been thrown into the ring this time around is the storm that’s been brewing over who exactly “deserves” a ticket in the first place.
The toxicity has been all over my social media feeds for weeks now: people who followed the band back in the ‘good old days’ complaining, for instance, both about the ticket prices and about the youngsters who have ‘discovered’ Oasis for the first time (some of whom can’t even remember a time when they were together), having the audacity to want to go and see them, too.
With people having set aside hours of their time to try to secure tickets, the furore over the resales that followed and the bad will fomenting on social media, my instinct is it’s time for a rethink in the way we sell tickets.
Surely we need a new system here: one that lets fans enjoy the artists they want to see, at prices they can actually afford? In the feeding frenzy that has followed the Oasis gig sale, it feels very much like those fans are just collateral damage for those in pursuit of profits.
