Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, One Direction, The Cure, and most recently – Oasis, have all once fallen victim to their concert tickets reselling for thousands for seats on opposite ends of the venues. In fact, the average resale price for Taylor Swift’s most recent tour reached approximately $3,801 for the best tickets, despite the artist opting out of the possibility for ticketing sites such as Ticketmaster to use dynamic pricing in the official ticket sales.
The recent Oasis ticketing queue numbers have seen over 520,000 people waiting to get on the website alone, with the capacity of one of the concert venues – Wembley Stadium, being just 90,000. This means there were around 5.5 people attempting to get on the website per single ticket sold.
Dynamic pricing suggests that when tickets are in high demand, their prices rise to amounts higher than the initial ticket price announcements suggested. In the case of Oasis, fans had mere minutes to panic-buy tickets at a price of £355 each, instead of the earlier confirmed £135, after already queuing for hours on the website. Whereas artists always have the choice not to partake in dynamic pricing, many, like The Cure’s Robert Smith, have argued that if no artists participate in the process, it will “cease to exist”.
Numerous customers have now filed over 450 complaints to the government, as well as to advertising organisers and private companies who protest against the surges in ticket prices on the day of each pre-sale and general sale. Furthermore, private law firms have further claimed that through the way Ticketmaster used dynamic pricing in the Oasis sale, they may have breached consumer regulations despite the process itself not being illegal in the UK.
The Secretary of State for Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy has announced the day after the Oasis Reunion ticket sales that the UK government will run an investigation into dynamic pricing on sites such as Ticketmaster, in an attempt to make going to concerts and accessing live music accessible to more people, especially considering the current cost of living crisis. One of the means through which they plan to do this includes improved transparency regarding when dynamic pricing is being used and a clear explanation of how queuing mechanisms on ticketing sites work. Furthermore, this investigation will be put in place as a part of the Labour Party’s manifesto pledge to improve access to cultural activities such as theatre, sports, and live music events.
Despite these promises, and even if dynamic pricing were to be put to an end, there would still be the problems of people who managed to get tickets on the day reselling them on third-party websites for multiple times the original price. The most notable recent case that comes to mind is Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, where her tickets were reselling for thousands of dollars above face value, and fans often preferred to travel to another continent and go to her concert there, all for a cheaper price than that of a single resale ticket.
With the current cost of living crisis and prices of essential products continuing to rise, dynamic pricing eliminates the possibility of going to concerts for many individuals
The European Union holds laws regarding anti-scalping, in which the most popular ticketing websites are required to submit reports of how many tickets re-sold through third parties they cancel per year. With Live Nation’s annual revenue rising by 36% in the past year, the chief executive Michael Rapino has confirmed that dynamic pricing was a crucial business decision resulting in this increase.
Ticketmaster and the Gallagher brothers have yet to speak out about the recent ticket sales for Oasis’ reunion tour. However, what we can be sure of is that with the current cost of living crisis and prices of essential products continuing to rise, dynamic pricing eliminates the possibility of going to concerts for many individuals, some being lifelong fans of the band. In fact, Sinn Féin’s president, Mary Lou McDonald, has further stated that the extortionate pricing will especially eliminate working-class fans of Oasis, going as far as to say that they are being “thrown under the bus”.
Without the fans who stay willing to put their time and effort into buying things such as concert tickets, a lot of the bands mentioned would not thrive. Opting out of dynamic pricing, as many artists nowadays do, is just one step towards eliminating the issue. However, these efforts will only go so far without proper intervention, not just from our government but from multiple governments which allow dynamic pricing to take place.
