The return of Oasis, the chart-dominating bad boys of ’90s Britpop, has been one of the biggest stories on the music beat this summer, with a slate of surprise reunion shows in Britain and Ireland selling out instantly over the last week.
But the rush also introduced many fans to the frustrating vagaries of online ticketing, where the prices are not always what you expect (and they usually go up).
Last weekend, after the first batch of shows went on sale, angry Oasis fans took to social media to complain that many tickets that had been advertised at 148 British pounds (around $195) ended up more than doubling in price to £355 (about $468) by the time they went to pay.
The band came under fire, and in Britain — where the reconciliation of the group’s long-feuding leaders, Liam and Noel Gallagher, was front-page news — politicians readily took up the cause.
“About half the country was probably queuing for tickets over the weekend,” Keir Starmer, the prime minister, said in Parliament on Wednesday when asked about the furor. “But it is depressing to hear of price hikes.”
It was the loudest uproar over a concert ticket sale since Taylor Swift fans — and bots — crashed Ticketmaster nearly two years ago. Oasis fans and the news media were quick to point to “dynamic pricing,” in which fluctuations in demand can push the cost of a ticket well above its original face value, often with little or no warning to the consumer.
A British regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority, said on Thursday that it was opening an investigation into Ticketmaster’s handling of the sale, “including how so-called ‘dynamic pricing’ may have been used.”
Even Oasis cited that system. In an announcement this week adding two more dates to its itinerary — bringing the total to 19 so far — the band said that it “at no time had any awareness that dynamic pricing was going to be used,” though added that its managers and promoters had agreed to “a positive ticket sale strategy, which would be a fair experience for fans, including dynamic ticketing.”
Ticketmaster has been largely silent about the news. But in response to questions from The New York Times, the company disputed that the Oasis sale involved dynamic pricing — at least as consumers commonly understand that term, as a complex computerized system resulting in constant, minute pricing changes in response to demand.
“Ticketmaster does not set prices, nor do we have or offer algorithmic surge pricing technologies,” the company said in a statement. “Furthermore, Ticketmaster did not change prices during this sale — prices were established before the sale began.”
To fans who ended up paying far more than they had expected, however, that distinction may be a matter of splitting hairs. Even more confusing, many fans noticed that Ticketmaster had labeled the pricey tickets as “in demand standing.” In some ways, the spikes for those spots seemed to resemble what Ticketmaster calls “platinum” pricing, in which, the company has said, seats are “dynamically priced up and down based on demand.”
Larry Miller, the director of the music business program at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development, said in an interview that in either case, the result is the same — fans paid more.
“Whatever the tools were,” Miller said, we’re looking at a large and vocal number of fans who were disappointed that after spending hours in a queue, the price they were presented was not the price that they were advertised.”
“However that different, higher price was achieved,” he added, “Ticketmaster needs to do a better job communicating that to the fans in the queue.”
Whether it was used for the Oasis tickets or not, dynamic pricing has been an important part of Ticketmaster’s tool kit for years. And despite some bad publicity when prices reach stratospheric levels, it has largely been embraced in the industry as a way to maximize sales and combat scalpers by pricing tickets closer to what fans are ultimately willing to pay — an amount that is often revealed on resale sites like StubHub and SeatGeek.
The system has left many fans feeling exploited, though its larger effects are unclear. For his most recent tour, Bruce Springsteen — who for decades had deliberately kept ticket prices low — drew rare blowback from fans when dynamic pricing caused some seats to go as high as $5,000.
Yet once last year’s receipts for Springsteen’s global tour were counted, the average price paid per ticket was only $110, according to the trade publication Pollstar. That was well below the mean price of $131 for last tear’s top 100 tours, and a bargain compared to Drake ($260) or Beyoncé ($209), who also used dynamic pricing.
And it is not going away.
On an earnings call with investors in February, Michael Rapino, Live Nation’s chief executive, said the company is in the process of expanding dynamic pricing around the world.
“Outside of the U.S., we’re in the first inning,” he said. “We’re just rolling this out around the world. So that’s the great growth opportunity, obviously.”
Miller, of N.Y.U., described the Oasis ticketing problems the latest in a series of controversies in recent years over fan access to the hottest concerts — like Swift, Springsteen and Beyoncé — where it is inevitable that demand will outpace supply. But too often, fans end up feeling not just left out but ripped off.
“Maybe this is a reality check,” Miller said, “for everybody in the live music value chain.”
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