After Oasis tickets shot up from £148 to £355, Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy has promised to review one of the most common – and legal – ways fans get ripped off
After this weekend, many Oasis fans will be drowning their sorrows with “cigarettes & alcohol” and “looking back in anger” at the fraught, stressful experience of buying tickets for the band’s upcoming reunion tour, as prices shot up from £148 to £355. As Labour’s Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy vows to “roll with it” and review the practice of surge pricing, could this finally be the end of Ticketmaster’s reign of terror? Definitely... Maybe.
Labour had already promised to look into the problem of touts buying up tickets and reselling them at extortionate prices, but this was always a limited approach. Ticketmaster, while operating with perfect legality, has for a long time been the biggest rip-off merchant out there. This is thanks to a practice called “dynamic pricing”, where the cost of a ticket inflates in line with how much people are willing to pay – ‘golden circle’ tickets for Beyoncé’s last tour, for example, shot up from £140 to over £400, and there are surely people still in therapy today processing their harrowing experiences in the Eras tour trenches.
Whenever this issue comes up, some smart aleck will say, “well, that’s just how the market operates! Have you never heard of a little known concept called supply and demand??” That much is true, professor, but what if I said that unfettered free-market capitalism is bad? Anyway, you don’t have to be a communist to disagree with the concept of dynamic surging. We’ve had anti-monopoly laws for over a hundred years to ensure stuff like this doesn’t happen. There isn’t actually free competition in the current music economy, because Ticketmaster – thanks to its ownership by Live Nation – enjoys a monopoly over a significant portion of the music venues in Britain and elsewhere. For most bands and most tours, there is no other option.
Ticketmaster isn’t solely responsible for ripping off fans, as artists can choose to opt out of dynamic pricing — but even when they have done so, as Robert Smith of the Cure did last year, the company still whacks on an extortionate range of fees. Individual artists can and should take a stand against dynamic pricing, if they care about their gigs being even halfway accessible to anyone other than the wealthy, but their resistance alone can only go so far when there are so few viable alternatives.
So it’s good that Labour are stepping in, and hopefully its review will lead to concrete action – if they can ban smoking outside night clubs, surely they can put their meddling impulses to good use for once. We may never return to the halcyon days when a stadium gig cost £30, but it would be nice to at least go into slightly less credit card debt when we want to see our favourite artists. Maybe music fans will finally have a reason to “stop crying our hearts out”. “Little by little” things really could get better. Wonderwall.