If you tried and failed to get Oasis tickets at the weekend, you are most certainly not alone. When they went live at 9am on Saturday (August 31) morning, the internet went ahead and maybe (definitely) lost its collective mind. Systems on the Ticketmaster website saw many people stuck in a queue to access a queue, and then be behind more than 270,000 people (the equivalent to three whole Wembley Stadiums full of people).
But, despite all that hassle to even access a ticket selection screen, it was what happened afterwards to many people that is the subject of heavy controversy. A few hours into tickets going on sale, many fans (myself included) noticed that when they made it to the front of the queue, they were only given the option of tickets that were in ‘demand’, which equated to the matter of adding the best part of £200 on to the tickets in the same section’s initial value (fun, right?).
Standing tickets at Wembley Stadium, for example, were set at the value of £151.25, but the new ‘dynamic pricing’ of tickets saw them jump to the £350 mark, and that’s before adding on the booking fees. This was a stumbling block for many, having waited for hours in a queue for tickets they thought would be far cheaper than they were when arriving at the front of the online-line.
Following this ticketing debacle, Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy has called for an end to “rip-off resales” and called it “depressing to see vastly inflated prices excluding ordinary fans” from live experiences. She followed this by saying that ministers would be looking into “issues around the transparency and use of dynamic pricing, including the technology around queuing systems which incentivise it”.
Speaking to The Guardian, Liberal Democrat culture spokesperson Jamie Stone MP also said: “It is scandalous to see our country’s biggest cultural moments being turned into obscene cash cows by greedy promoters and ticketing websites. The Oasis ticket fiasco must be a watershed moment and lead to an official investigation, either by the watchdog or a parliamentary body.”
It is not clear whether the band themselves knew about the dynamic pricing, but Oasis did put out a statement warning against the reselling of tickets for profit. They stated that Ticketmaster and Twickets (a site only selling tickets at face value or lower) were the only places tickets should be listed.
Dynamic pricing is legal, and has been in practice by Ticketmaster since 2022. Labour had committed to cracking down on ticket touting in their latest manifesto, though this practice does not fall under these terms. Comments by ministers would suggest, however, that there could be a rethink due to the scale of people affected by dynamic pricing when trying to book Oasis tickets.