Will Oasis backlash force a reckoning for the ticket industry?

After six hours in an online queue for tickets to the Oasis reunion tour, Alan Dick was devastated to find their price had more than doubled to £358 apiece. 

“It broke my heart walking away from it but I had to,” said the 43-year-old, who was unaware of sales platform Ticketmaster’s pricing model and “didn’t think they could do that”.

A backlash among fans of the Manchester band who are outraged at being charged far more for tickets than others has intensified scrutiny of “dynamic pricing”, where the cost of tickets changes according to demand.

The UK government said this week it would include the issue in a wider consultation on ticket prices, while the US Department of Justice launched an antitrust investigation in May into Ticketmaster’s owner Live Nation Entertainment. The EU is also looking at the business practices of Ticketmaster as part of a wider evaluation of the effectiveness of consumer protection legislation.

Advocates of dynamic pricing say it helps stamp out touts, also known as scalpers, who strip billions of dollars a year out of the entertainment industry by buying up tickets and reselling them at a profit on sites such as Viagogo and StubHub.

Bill Zysblat, business manager for the Rolling Stones, Lady Gaga and U2, said that it was “just brutal” to see users of StubHub “charging 10 times the face value when the artist could be earning that”.

“Rather than have the scalpers make the money, of course we want the artists to make the money and have nicer buses to sleep in,” he added. “On the other hand they don’t want to be charging a fortune for tickets — it’s a really, really hard decision.”

Raising prices to combat scalping is a tactic that has been used for years. During a 2016 frenzy to get seats for the musical Hamilton, producers raised ticket prices to $849 — a Broadway record but still well below prices in the secondary market, which had surged to thousands of dollars.

A Financial Times analysis found that the price rise was effective, almost halving the number of tickets resold on StubHub. 

Dynamic pricing is common at larger US arenas but in the UK, where Ticketmaster is the only major ticketing company to have adopted the system, many concertgoers remain unfamiliar with it. 

Live Nation has made clear that it will continue a worldwide rollout of the model, claiming it is doing so at the behest of artists and promoters eager to hit back at ticket touts.

“Promoters are anxious for it . . . artists are anxious for it,” chief executive Michael Rapino said on an earnings call earlier this year.

Most of the money from ticket sales — typically 80-90 per cent — is divided between the artist and the promoter, with Ticketmaster taking the rest, although details vary from deal to deal. 

In a blog post this year titled “The truth about ticket prices”, Live Nation argued that a primary ticketing company’s typical profit per ticket of roughly 2 per cent of the average price was “far too low” to be the cause of high prices.

It said factors behind high prices “begin with the economic conditions that explain most pricing: supply and demand”, adding that “we are fortunate that artists in this category choose not to exercise their full pricing power; otherwise, they would charge the much higher prices we see on resale markets”.

And while it defended dynamic pricing’s role in squeezing out ticket touts, it said that it was not Ticketmaster that sets price levels but performers and producers.

Announcing that its tour had sold out, Oasis warned fans on X to “please be aware of counterfeit and void tickets appearing on the secondary market”, saying tickets could only be resold at face value via Ticketmaster and resale site Twickets.

Although many popular artists tacitly condone dynamic pricing by allowing or asking Ticketmaster to use the system, some have avoided charging higher prices for fear of appearing greedy and alienating fans. 

Smaller bands have been more vocal in opposing the system — but they are less likely to see any large financial benefits.

However, larger bands such as The Cure have also hit out at the excessive fees being charged by sites such as Ticketmaster, with frontman Robert Smith pledging ahead of the band’s US tour earlier this year that there would be “no ‘platinum’ or ‘dynamically priced’ tickets”.

Singer Neil Young wrote last year that he worried that “artists have to worry about ripped-off fans blaming them for Ticketmaster add-ons and scalpers. Concert tours are no longer fun. Concert tours [are] not what they were.”

The US investigation into Live Nation is looking to tackle what officials see as its monopoly position, with Ticketmaster accounting for at least 70 per cent of the total face value associated with all tickets sold at large US arenas and stadiums in 2022. 

In a complaint filed to a district court in New York, the DoJ said Ticketmaster had “a pricing team that makes pricing recommendations — including recommendations as to average and minimum face value of tickets. And typically, it is Ticketmaster’s own pricing team that adjusts the face value of tickets based on demand for a particular show.” 

However, Live Nation told the FT this week that “all ticket prices . . . are set by the tour”. 

While dynamic pricing has long been used in other industries, including airlines, hotels, ride-sharing and even ecommerce, Adam Webb, campaign manager at anti-tout consumer group FanFair Alliance, said likening its use in live music to other sectors was not “a fair comparison”. 

In other industries “you’re expecting the price to be lower at the beginning and then go up, whereas in live music it is working the opposite way around”, he said, referring to how a scramble to secure tickets for high-profile acts as soon as they went on sale meant prices often surged immediately. 

At a time when many consumers are under financial pressure, Oasis, its promoter and the ticketing company have all been accused of ripping off devoted fans desperate to see the band’s first gigs in the UK and Ireland in 16 years.

After announcing two extra shows at London’s Wembley Stadium, the band said on Wednesday it “at no time had any awareness that dynamic pricing was going to be used”, blaming the decision to use the system on its promoters and management, and that “the execution of the plan failed to meet expectations”.

The reunion of the band following a long-running feud between its leaders Noel and Liam Gallagher sparked the biggest ticket sale ever in the UK, with 10mn people joining the online queues from 158 countries.

A person close to the band said the majority of tickets were sold to fans at base prices, with only a small number subject to dynamic pricing later in the queue.

MCD, the band’s concert promoter in Ireland, as well as DF Concerts & Events in Scotland, are partly owned by Live Nation. The English shows are co-promoted by Live Nation and SJM Concerts. A representative for Oasis declined to comment. SJM was not available for comment.

“It’s a perfect storm,” said Reg Walker, director of Iridium, a security company that works with event organisers and bands. “You still have a cost of living crisis, [and it is a band] with an emotive, loyal fan base that’s been waiting to see their favourite band for a decade and a half. All of a sudden they find that they’re just priced out of the market.”

Jean-Pierre Dubé of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business said “the role of the classic sunk cost fallacy” was also a factor. “This led to many people feeling compelled to buy the tickets at the inflated cost, because they had already invested so much time and effort into the buying process.” 

However, music industry bosses suggest that the controversy around Oasis was unlikely to stop bands from choosing the system, even if Ticketmaster may come under pressure to make its use clearer to consumers.

“There will likely be continued rumblings about the perceived unfairness to the public and the greed,” said one live events executive. But he added, “given that Oasis has been so big with enduring demand, it’s a convenient way to make the public aware that this is acceptable practice for the future”.

Any action by UK regulators is likely to look at whether Ticketmaster was clear enough about its pricing. Consumer protection law states that businesses should not mislead consumers about the price they must pay for a product — whether by providing false or deceptive information, leaving out important information or providing it too late.

“I think there will be [consumer] pressure on artists and particularly on ticket companies not to use surge pricing,” said Michael Waterson, emeritus professor at the University of Warwick, who was commissioned in 2016 by the previous UK government to review anti-touting measures.

“There are many ticketing companies in Britain, and it’s not clear [whether the pricing mechanism] will be as easily accepted as it would be in the US where Ticketmaster has a real stranglehold on the market.”