On August 27, 2024 Oasis announced their 2025 reunion tour, the first time Liam and Noel Gallagher will perform together in 16 years since their disbandment in 2009. 
On Aug. 31, the day the general sale was set to begin, thousands of fans who were promised a ticket buying experience free of scalpers, bots, and resellers logged on, but were met with soaring ticket prices and only a few walked away with tickets. So, what happened? 
Oasis used Ticketmaster’s face value exchange program, a clause ensuring tickets resell for the price the seller bought them at and to discourage scalpers from nabbing fistfuls of concert tickets. But Oasis had also opted into dynamic pricing, a system where tickets are priced by demand, instead of proximity to the artist, which shattered the illusion of what Oasis fans thought would be accessible concert tickets. 
How did we get here? On October 22, 2022, Taylor Swift announced the “Eras Tour,” and Ticketmaster, in anticipation of the demand, opted to use their Verified Fan lottery system. Where eager fans would register for a chance to win a code which allowed them to purchase their seat. But more codes were sent to fans than there were available tickets, and the tickets sold so quickly due to bots and scammers hoping to make a quick profit that the public sale of the tour was canceled – leading to many unsuccessful lawsuits, petitions and even a hearing in front of the Supreme Court.
If you aren’t a Swiftie, or an Oasis fan, you may believe that price-gouging when it comes to concert sales doesn’t affect you or even that scalping tickets is a product of the free market, but these cultural shifts in concert accessibility may have dangerous consequences for the future of live music.
What happens when seats are empty, not because of the artist of their marketing team, but because no one can afford to buy them? When venues panic after losing money on parking, merchandise and other sources of revenue only brought by attendees who physically attended?
While Ticketmaster, with their face-value exchange program, claims to want to protect fans from resellers, if the artist opts in, former ticket scalpers and members of resale groups testify that Ticketmaster secretly offers deals and presales to known resellers. Meaning that most of the time, scalpers have access to tickets before fans. 
The world witnessed this during Beyonce’s “Renaissance Tour,” where entire sections were sold out before the tour was even announced.
In an already perilous economy, Ticketmaster recognized that scalpers and bots reselling tickets for tens of thousands of dollars causes damage to their reputation and harms their customer base, so they enact performative measures to appear as if they care about consumers while collecting the fees from every single $2,000-$40,000 ticket resold on their platform.
This vicious cycle of Ticketmaster pandering to desperate fans while also taking advantage of them is no doubt due to the 2009 merger of Ticketmaster and Live Nation, which gave Ticketmaster exclusive access to nearly every artist in the world.
Despite outrageous ticket prices, the fault line spreading across the future of live music is not entirely due to scummy middle-aged men in basements buying thirty “Eras Tour” tickets. The root of the problem lies at what drove them all to that digital queue in the first place; living in a world where with every year that passes you need increasing amounts of money to survive, because of unregulated, shameless corporate greed.

Categories: Arts & Entertainment