Oasis & The Dynamic Pricing Dance
On the away fans coach to Barrow there’s absolute silence. None of the mighty red’s faithful are speaking beyond the sacred words “Presale is up.” A coach load of largely middle-aged and largely men sit their faces illuminated in the blue light of the Ticketmaster home screen.
Most are in the queue for the queue. Few are in the actual queue. Fewer are even in the triple digits. All but Darren. Darren. Bald, early 50’s remembers-student-nights-in-Sheffield. Remembers Knebworth but not being there because he couldn’t get tickets. He is not going to miss this chance. A crowd gathers as he breaks into the double digits. It’s a rapid fall. He’s down to 20. No one can quite believe it. They are going to see it. They are going to see someone by Oasis Tickets. Darren is calculating how many to get. Kris will want to come and he can’t not take his boy who he doesn’t see much since the divorce. Then it happens he’s there. He can buy a ticket.
“£4000!” he gasps, maybe he can sell his vintage Manic Street Preachers shirt collection to get him there. Yes, they have some suspect stains in the arms but true fans won’t care. He decides to get the one. He can facetime his boy when he’s there, if he’ll even pick up. Then the site crashes.
“Fu-
Darren isn’t alone in this. I thought about it and decided against it. But many people had a similar experience on that Saturday. However, in the coming days, I had no idea how important a debate was about to form from experiences like mine and many others. The debate around dynamic pricing has largely focused on the greed of the music industry and Oasis as a band in a horrid dance that the music industry must perform anytime there is a gig.
Let me talk you through this dance.
The last event of this magnitude was Taylor Swift's Eras Tour, which, in Sadiq Khan’s words “Helped provide £300 million to London’s Nighttime economy,” and likely helped provide a boost to the total economy that helped stave off a recession. Ticketmaster reported that nearly 2.9 million people tried to secure Taylor Swift tickets, where similar issues with queues for queues and limited capacity occurred. Compared to the 14 million who attempted to secure Oasis tickets, you can see where the problems begin to arise. With people putting themselves into debt to purchase tickets, we must begin to question how we ended up dancing this dance.
There’s been a lot of misinformation and misunderstanding surrounding how ticket pricing works in the UK. Let’s start with the conceptual ideal for a promoter, which is crucially and inevitably different from the consumer's perspective and work backwards to our current situation. The ideal scenario for a promoter of live events is to sell out on the day of the event. This means perfectly balancing the size of the venue and the price of the ticket. Think of this as a perfectly executed waltz. It’s refined, patient and most importantly, precise. As you can imagine, this is almost impossible to achieve perfectly every time. Moreover, an artist doesn’t want this; they ultimately desire the security of knowing there will be no empty seats and to sell out a week in advance. As a promoter, if you sell out a week in advance, you have left money on the street.
A crucial point is that both the artist and the promoter are doing a different dance. Smaller artists now find themselves balancing what money means to them at an early stage in their careers against the potential buzz, demand, and audience enjoyment available to them. Promoters for smaller artists would prefer to sell 501 seats in a 1,000-seater venue versus 500 seats in a 500-seater. So, you can see how the dance is now bumping together. This isn’t a waltz; it’s a rave.
Oasis faces a different problem entirely. No, not Liam Gallagher’s divorce from Patsy Kensit, although the £800,000 settlement may have played a part in all of this. Whereas, unlike smaller artists, for Oasis demand vastly outstrips any venue capacity in the world, unless you are doing 40 nights in the PyeongChang arena and for obvious reasons the Gallagher brothers are not mad for that. They could perform 100 nights at Wembley, and it still wouldn’t be sufficient. The main thing to understand, which is relevant for all artists but particularly acute for Oasis, is the effect of the secondary ticketing market.
As a topic, the secondary ticketing market is a whole different kettle of fish and too lengthy to dissect in detail at this stage. It encompasses everything from “My mate has a spare ticket if you want to buy it” to a man in a large coat outside a venue shouting, “Tickets! Tickets! Tickets!” It is legal for them to say, “You can have it for face value” or “You can have it for £2,000”; both are equally legal, if unequally moral. Artists, promoters, and agents have lobbied the government for some time to make this practice illegal, but the government has refused to act. So that is the state of play regarding the existence of the secondary ticketing market. Because this secondary market exists and will always exist when demand outstrips supply, the band are no longer setting the ticket price—the audience is. If you know even a little about free market economics, you will know this is Ayn Rand’s wet dream.
Oasis, along with many other artists, have previously been a pioneer in attempting to eliminate this secondary ticketing market by installing measures to allow ticket transfers only at face value or for no fee. These measures have only improved with sites like Dice providing tools for live events that prevent the secondary market; but these measures are just a small hose trying to put out a large fire. Think of the Springfield tire fire from The Simpsons—it's now its own ecosystem that requires legislative help to clean up.
Bearing in mind this Randian nightmare of which the music industry is now a part, inevitably, artists like Madonna, Ed Sheeran, and Oasis cannot do enough dates with enough seats to supply demand. Whatever price they put on tickets; the market value is higher. A reminder here is that there is still a dance going on, and as I said earlier, this isn’t a ballroom; it’s a rave. It’s two people grinding against each other, hoping to feel some connection as the sweat runs down their backs. It’s intimate and hot, but there’s an element of grime to it all that leaves us feeling a bit of fear in our stomachs when we wake up in a stranger’s bed after a night of excess.
In defence of Oasis, the secondary ticket market is inevitable – as we have established – and, crucially, the profits of this market do not go to the band. Every member of the band, their management, the venue staff, anyone who has even moved a cable, a flight box, or printed a poster all have the right to a share of that money. Someone who buys a ticket and sells it for £800 pure profit, having done no work but simply capitalised on demand, clearly has no right to that money. We can all agree that if there is extra money to be made from an Oasis gig, it should go to those who worked for it. The problem is that were they to charge the amount that would guarantee there wasn’t an inflated secondary ticketing market, they would have to sell the tickets for what they are worth. The tickets should have cost £2,000 upfront because that’s what they will be sold for on the secondary market, as that is their true value.
Something that was frequently mentioned, in a real return to 90s form, was the comparison with Blur’s recent tour, which did not utilise dynamic pricing. It was pointed out that Blur did a certain number of tour dates for a certain price, and that was the cost of the tickets; however, that’s not the actual cost due to the secondary market. If you are an artist who happens to have the luxury of not needing to get the true value of their work and are happy to allow the vast majority to fall into the secondary ticketing market, then that’s great. You are in a position to not work for the money and perform for the love of it, having made the decision at some stage to forsake profit.
Returning to the dance, specifically concerning Oasis: as I referenced earlier, members of Oasis have substantial bills to pay, so they are trying to maximise their earnings without charging the actual amount the tickets are worth, which is set by the audience in the secondary market that cannot be controlled. The issue that is glaringly apparent is the dishonesty from Oasis surrounding the whole situation. They initially attempted to create a false narrative that in an ideal world we would be paying £73, and everyone would get tickets. However, that is far too cheap for the true value of the tickets, and it plays into a grim reality that consumers have come to expect music and the music industry to cost far less than it’s truly worth while simultaneously unconsciously exploiting the supply and demand discrepancy that larger acts like Oasis create.
Secondly, following the initial backlash, the notion that Liam and Noel were somehow not privy to the conversations surrounding dynamic pricing is absurd and frankly insulting to their fans. I cannot believe the idea that Liam and Noel, after 19 years of fans asking them to reform, would agree, and that profits would never come up. The conversation would have been solely about money, given the added context we now know. I cannot accept the childish passing of the buck by the band onto their management, playing on their outsider aesthetic. It wears thin knowing they are the industry, and their excuses ring both hollow and insulting. The idea that they did not agree to dynamic pricing is absurd, and yes, we can be annoyed as outsiders to the dance where it was agreed upon.
Dynamic pricing is one of those mechanics of society we have all accepted. It’s like the no trainer’s policy in a bad nightclub, where you have to wear socks over your trainers to get in. We aren’t sure who exactly decided it was better for the club, but we just go along with it. We have grown to accept dynamic pricing in other areas of our day-to-day lives. The furore that arose from this practice was as if it had never been utilised before, but if you have ever bought a plane ticket, you have been subject to dynamic pricing. I have travelled on GWR trains and watched as the price has increased in real-time due to dynamic pricing. We, as a society, have grown to accept it in various aspects of our lives, and as is the great beauty of our financial system, if industries find a way to extract fractionally more money from us and optimise demand, they will. All in a bid to increase shareholder value.
In my view, Oasis had cynically planned to hide behind vague terms like “management” and “promoters” to say, “All we wanted to do was sell you tickets for £73 and have a real good laugh and enjoy the music because we are on your side.” In reality, the management, agents, promoters, and artists are all on the same team. It’s like going to your friends and blaming the estate agent for the price of your house. No estate agent would sell your house for a price you didn’t agree to.
This, coupled with the length of the queue, adds up to a particularly unpleasant dance. So, as consumers, when we join the dance, it’s as if we are waiting outside the rave for hours, only to be let in just as the lights turn on and we can see the damp warehouse for what it really is.
In this instance, in an ideal world, if every person who got to the front of the queue saw the inflated price and pulled out, we would deem the price above the market rate. With Oasis, the real issue for many is not just that they have essentially become their own touts. People want goodies and baddies when they are paying more than they expected, and they would rather a tout be the baddie than their favourite band—especially a band that makes quite a lot out of their working-class heritage and relationship with an audience that defines themselves as a working-class fanbase. The truth is this is a problem of transparency; if they wanted to be open and honest, I think many people would have paid the true value anyway.
Dynamic pricing is a cynical tool used to get closer to the actual value of the ticket because they know there’s no way on earth, we as consumers would pay the actual value. We are so conditioned to expect music and art to be cheap and accessible like it was in the 90s, but it’s not the 90s anymore. Spotify and other streaming sites have seen to that. For mid-level bands, the dance between value for money and service to their audience is nearly impossible. As I mentioned before, artists like Robert Smith, Blur, and Paul Heaton “I’d rather play to a full room of happy fans than a half full room of rich ones”, who forsake their share of the secondary market, lose no street cred in forgoing profit. But I must ask: why do we as consumers find it acceptable to expect an artist to forego profit?
At this point in the dance, everyone is tired. Some of us want a coffee, while others are checking to ensure there are condoms left in their wallets. The lights are about to come up, and everyone is set to disperse into the night. So go on, you crazy animals, get a taxi home, and we can do this whole dance again next weekend. Ah there’s my baggie.
Written by George Trueman
Opinion
