It’s poignant to watch middle-aged Oasis fans railing about greedy ticket pricing when raging Swifties turned a Ticketmaster website debacle a couple of years ago into an event so explosive it sparked a) a US Senate judiciary hearing into the company’s monopoly and b) achieved the stunning feat of bringing Democrats and Republicans together in total unity about something.
You don’t have to be a Taylor Swift fan to bow to the numbers-savvy megastar who always had creative ways of maximising revenues. Way back in 2018 her tour tickets were released in batches, becoming progressively pricier as demand increased. A system Oasis fans might belatedly discern as dynamic pricing.
It’s not a defence of the squalid system to say that it’s no different from Ryanair or to argue that of the two, Ryanair’s model is the more socially impactful. Last weekend a group of English friends forced to make a sudden decision to fly to Ireland in tragic circumstances had to choose between paying £400 return (nearly €460), the lowest fare at a few hours’ notice, or miss a morning’s work. Low fares apply when the buyer has the flexibility to wait it out or jump in. A gig may be a powerful emotional charge but there is no such thing as a gig emergency. It’s just entertainment. Artists have a choice over pricing and conditions. Ed Sheeran, a 13-time platinum winner and the most played UK artist last year, choose to cap his ticket prices and doesn’t allow dynamic pricing. Fans have a choice about where to spend their money.
Oasis fans are unibrow-deep in nostalgia for the golden days when the venues were smaller and there was no online carry-on allowing foreign interlopers to lift tickets from the locals. In the mid-1990s, Irish fans who queued through the early hours could buy tickets at £20 to £25 (that’s Irish pounds) for bands at their peak such as Oasis or Radiohead. In 1996 the mighty Pearl Jam, with three top-selling albums in the US, could be seen in Millstreet for just £16. Last June, it cost between €117 and €165 to see them in Marlay Park. For context, a service or goods costing €20 in 1996 would cost about €36.25 now according to the CSO’s handy inflation calculator. So let’s be generous and say prices have doubled. By this reckoning Pearl Jam tickets have more than trebled above inflation.
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But here’s the difference between Pearl Jam and, say, Oasis. Back in the 1990s when Liam and Noel were publicly hurling playground insults at one another while bickering privately over whether “bad boy” behaviour boosted the band, Pearl Jam was at war with Ticketmaster for tacking charges on to tickets for a couple of charity concerts in Chicago. When Ticketmaster refused to waive the charges, the band realised that performers like themselves had a problem. Ticketmaster wasn’t just the largest ticket sales platform in the US; it also had deals with most of the country’s large music venues that required tickets to be sold through the company.
So the band had the idea of cutting out Ticketmaster and performing in abandoned military bases across the US instead. President Bill Clinton was asked to help but didn’t approve. The band filed a civil suit with the justice department and a few months later testified before Congress accusing Ticketmaster of using monopolistic practices to raise prices. It hardly rattled the company. Ultimately the justice department dropped its investigation and the band cancelled its 1994 tour. At peak earning power, Pearl Jam was doing the opposite of maximising revenues in an effort to tame the power of Ticketmaster – and even it failed. That was 30 years ago, just a few years before the 2010 merger allowed between Ticketmaster and the world’s largest concert promoter Live Nation, which created Live Nation Entertainment (LNE), birthing a colossus without equal in the multibillion-dollar live music business. Concert promoter, artist manager, venue owner, ticket seller and reseller, constituting an empire that its executives publicly herald as the “largest live entertainment company in the world”, to quote the Washington Post. Last year alone, the company produced more than 50,000 concerts and other musical events and it sold more than 620 million tickets globally, it boasted to investors in April.
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It was the Swifties’ reaction to high fees and site outages that finally brought it all to a head in May when the US department of justice’s lawsuit against LNE made it into a Senate judiciary hearing, aiming to undo the merger, charging that it had stifled competition and hurt consumers. Ultimately it comes down to the free market, to supply and demand, to what people are willing to pay either as superfans or to be seen. But somewhere in there, people exhausted by the relentless hustle smell a rat. Imagine if the Oasis sales operation was conducted entirely in the physical world of 50-something males with short fuses. Ticket prices are announced, the lads physically queue for 10 hours (because everyone is told that tickets are still available) – but when they finally reach the front the real life salesperson tells them the price has gone up by 300-400 per cent and they can take it or leave it because the operators control the ticket system and the venues. Over the ensuing physical mayhem, might they be entitled to ask if the whole operation was based on a fallacy?
It’s also a safe bet that the Gallagher brothers’ reunion isn’t a one-time-only thing either.