August 31st, 2024, a date that will live in infamy for many music fans. It should have been a regular old Saturday morning with a cup of tea and drowsy greetings, but instead it was the start of a 10-hour long slog that only resulted in disappointment for millions of people who were trying, on that fateful morning, to book Oasis tickets using the faulty Ticketmaster site.
I’m of course talking about the Oasis reunion tickets fiasco which left the internet ablaze for a week or so following the stories of unreliable connections to the website, queueing with 500,000 people just to have a chance to book a ticket, and the fact that people were getting kicked out of said queues because they were flagged as a bot. To summarise, it was hell for real fans; and I make the distinction of “real fans” since many of those who managed to get tickets either weren’t real fans of the band or they were buying them just so they could resell them elsewhere at over ten times the face value (despite the fact these tickets would ultimately be invalid). That being said, the face value wasn’t exactly a bargain: to see Oasis in 1996 at Knebworth, you’d have to fork out a whopping £22.50; to see the newly reformed Oasis, you’d have to pay £73. For some this was a reasonable price, and I suppose it was, until they started to inflate the prices up to £350 for a standard ticket.
However, this wasn’t the end of the pricing issue, as people were only allowed to resell tickets and purchase them on one platform and one platform only, Twickets. This was to alleviate concerns of scalping, as tickets were being sold on Viagogo for up to £5000 despite the fact everyone knew they would be invalid. The main issue arose over the fact that despite promising that tickets would only be resold at face value, there was a £50 booking fee, and “face value” meant the inflated value of £350. The booking fee was subsequently dropped to around £25 but it still cost people almost £1000 for two tickets.
This is where Ticketmaster’s dynamic pricing system comes into play, this system allows Ticketmaster to inflate ticket prices based on demand to over four times the face value. Some say this means reserving live shows for the rich only. Ticketmaster justify it by saying it helps to combat ticket scalpers, those who purchase tickets to resell them for thousands, but this has led to it becoming very hard to see the artists you love and demonstrates the corporate greed of big ticketing companies. Sadly, this is by no means an isolated case of said greed, as Ticketmaster has shady practices and controversies running back decades.
A very notable, but early, example of the sheer greed of Ticketmaster is demonstrated in the 1994 case of “Pearl Jam VS Ticketmaster”, as it has come to be known. To give a rundown of what happened, Pearl Jam felt as if Ticketmaster were not only monopolising the ticket distribution service, but also were unfairly raising the price of tickets through service fees (Pearl Jam requested $1.80 service fees, but Ticketmaster ended up selling some tickets with service fees as high as $18).
If that wasn’t enough to convince you of the complete moral deprivation of this company, let’s use Taylor Swift’s Eras tour as a contemporary example. Taylor Swift encountered many of the same issues that Oasis would later experience: the website crashed continuously, the queues were ridiculous, and tickets were being bought by bots and resold for up to $22,000, an astronomical sum of money. This happened after people at Ticketmaster assured Taylor that the website could handle the demand her fans would put on it.
I find it shocking that Ticketmaster have refused reform on several occasions, refused to be transparent with artists, and most of all, blocked fans from seeing their favourite artists. This has greater implications than just personal dissatisfaction, this indicates to me that a complete decline in cultural enrichment is on the horizon, but not for all, no, only for those who are less well off in our society, those who deserve these experiences the most. Music should not be a luxury for the rich. Music is a universal form of human expression which should not be exploited by the upper echelons of the business world for monetary gain to this extent.