Thread started to avoid specific gig threads being inundated with comments about this. Please only use this thread to discuss the issues we have seen with Oasis and other events
Oasis could’ve set a price limit, but they don’t care. They are cashing in big time. They want big money for very little shows and this has become the norm it seems. Just look at Adele in Munich. Didn’t Ed Sheeran make sure prices were decent for his gigs? Garth Brooks tickets were 60 - 80 or something like that (I think). It can be done if the artist wants it to be. The fees need to be looked into though, that is a complete disgrace. Doubling the fees for the in demand tickets, wtf.
At the rate things are going with ticket price inflation we may have to mortgage our homes to buy tickets for concerts in 10 years time !
Regulation can't come soon enough imo .
Right now in Ireland the small gig economy is healthy in Dublin anyway .. But that is not the case over in UK where these big giant concert venues and hyper groups are sucking the money and life blood out of the music business , with smaller venues closing down and less and less smaller groups playing gigs. UK has been hit worse than we have in the last few years and people just don't have a lot of spare cash to go to gigs .
If people are putting money aside for entertainment out of a tight family budget , one or two of these high priced big events might mean a cut for any smaller gigs or nights out that they may have gone to before .
This is what the greed of these gougers are bringing about , the demise of music industry , and exactly why people like Robert Smith and a few others, who could charge higher prices if they wanted to , are speaking up about it .
Disgusting that these bands who go for this quick money have the utter cheek to talk about working class roots as in the Gallaghers , or helping food banks as with Taylor Swift, when they are dismantling the fabric of the industry and making it difficult for fans and younger bands starting out , alike .
I can see how this might happen - person a few hundred in the queue before your mate gets offered a ticket for 175 euro. The ticket is "locked" to their account until they complete the transaction. Decides 175 bucks is too much and cancels/timesout the transaction. Your mates queue ID is lucky enough to get the offer of that ticket on refresh - or something similiar - this things will happen with tiered pricing and so many folks in a queue - no matter the provider I would add.
Ticketmaster hasn't "Made" them do anything - they've, at every stage, made those decisions themselves.
Similar issue occur with long haul flights and airline websites, using different devices or login details ect can get vastly different prices for the same seats on the same flight.
Again,
What is the alternative?
Oasis say they want 200 million net for the "tour" but only want to play 15 shows.
Budgets are done out and total cost of tour once all bill including artist is paid is circa 400 million which includes a healthy profit for all involved (not least the artis)
But wait maximum number of tickets that can be sold is 1.2 million (15 *80K).
Average ticket price is going to need to be 333 odd euro (lets just forget about the other income streams that maybe available via the concerts, merch, food drinks etc)
So, how to TM get to the point whereby this is the average ticket price - fair enough they cannot use dynamic pricing.
So they go back to tiered ticket prices, so many at 200 euro, more at 300 euro and more circa 400 euro, a more at 500 - with the ultimate average price being 333 Euro.
Everyone is happy in the chain.
So there is a price list on the door - it's expensive but its there - but the punter won't know until they come off the queue what tickets are going to be available to them - no matter how you do it.
That's the reality of what we have here.
At the end of the day the figures have to work for all involved. If they don't work, it doesnt happen, either for the artist, the promoter or ultimately the consumer. They have the ultimate decision on whether to pay that price - no one else, no matter how much regulation you add.
😮😨😕…you could raise some eyebrows over in the Oasis reunion thread…! 😉
The main issue here is that Ticketmaster have a monopoly and should have been split years ago.
A big issue with this “dynamic pricing” is that it obfuscates the price of the event. A customer doesn’t know how much they will be spending until they commit hours of their morning in unreliable queues and only be given seconds to decide to buy. Ticketmaster know at the checkout stage that they have buy-in from the customer already and can throw any price at them. Could the customer walk away when they see the inflated prices? Yes, they could. But they probably won’t as ticketmaster has made them commit so much time and effort already into getting the tickets.
Since everyone is given a different price for the tickets, it’s more difficult to complain about the prices as there is no one-figure that everyone can point at and say is too expensive. It’s anti-competitive as a result.
As an aside, I have a mate who got to the end of the Oasis queue, was shown “dynamically prices “ tickets for 400 and decided not to buy. Out of boredom he refreshed the page and was shown tickets for 175e. More evidence that the system is a shambles.
Just because it can be identified as a component within an economic system doesn't make it ok.
Oasis must be the most over rated band in history.
Perhaps those who feel they have gotten a bad deal regarding ticket pricing, should attend the event and not spend money while there on such discretionary items as merchandize, food & drink ect.
Personally have no time for these nostalgia events and pension top up events for aged artists from the past.
That's capitalism. Happening everywhere else in the economy.
No matter what "system" there is, the consumer won't know until they get to the top of the queue what price options are availabe (because lower priced tickets may no longer be available). They might know the tiered prices that MIGHT be available to them and MAY have had the chance to decide before hand how much they were willing to pay.
And again, the consumer is not forced into anything - they have the opportunity to decide/chose.
Not if you had your heart set on going to one of said dynamically priced events and couldn't afford it in the end.
Yes, quench the instantaneous demand would be a good idea, except there's a massive hole in this plan, and that's the bot accounts which is buying up tickets. Even if you could get the humans to agree to back-off, the bots would just attempt to snap up the tickets.
The solution here is probably the blockchain as a means of controlling all of this mayhem.
dynamic pricing only affects a handful of concerts out of hundreds if not thousands a year in ireland. It’s all getting overblown
I think it is unfair that price information is withheld from the queue. All people have to go on regarding the state of the ticket market during a sale is social media, which really isn't good enough.
I think dynamic prices should be required to be provided in real time to the queue. I think this is something that promoters and acts would strongly resist. If the queue starts to collapse as prices increase then that takes away much of the pressure of making the purchase when presented with it.
I get it, you get it… but the average punter doesn't either want to have to understand that or even need to. It should be just like in the pubs where you see the price list on the door. No smoke and mirrors or fancy algorithms. Face-value of the bearer instrument (the ticket) should mean just that. Ticketmaster can't pick and choose how they want to run the sale and potential resale without oversight.
But the consumer is spending hours of their time and being kept in the dark as to what they’ll actually have to pay. If they do manage to get through the queue then they’re presented with obscenely high priced tickets and given a few minutes to decide whether or not to pull the trigger. Between the stress of it all, hype and fomo, it all seems designed to prey on fans and bleed them dry. It’s a completely scummy practice that people shouldn’t be subjected to.
Being logged into the site at 5am was no advantage. The waiting room opened at aprx 7.55am so everyone who clicked at that time went in at the same time.
How they randomly allocate who is placed where in the queue at 7.55am is the million dollar question.
The in demand algorithm is really quite simple. A range will be set by the promoter and as tickets sell the price creeps up. If too many people reject a particular price, then the demand price starts to fall. Demand pricing tries to find the correct market value for a ticket at a particular time.
So for example, we will say during a sale demand pricing is triggered, and prices rise to €300. All of a sudden people at the top of the queue stop buying and pull out. The price will then fall back to a level to where the ratio of buys to fails becomes acceptable.
As tickets continue to be sold, the market becomes aware of the scarcity and the price rises. The purchase to fail ratio changes too and also reflects the size of the queue remaining.
The only way to defeat demand pricing is a collective refusal to engage with it. That requires a level of organising which I doubt is possible these days
Rich is a very subjective word.
I'd argue that most concerts/football matches/events are currently the preserve of the "rich" only already and have been for decades. An average person living in Ireland is richer than 97% of the worlds population………
People keep saying 'concerts' like they're all the same. It's doing my head in. It's like saying 'football matches' when you're talking about Champions league finals. There'll be 20 great gigs in Dublin this week, great acts in lovely, small venues with crowds made up of sound people who love music. I don't give a **** if Coldplay become an act only accessible to the rich. Actual music is there whenever people want it.
Again, no one is being forced into paying more than they should. The consumer has the option at any stage not to buy the ticket.
When Mary Lou McDonald came out with an idea to set house prices at €300K the outrage from the shysters in government was off the scale. Now it's outrage because concert ticket prices are not set in stone.
Valencia in La Liga in Spain are bringing this in with their league matches. It's the way it's going to be in the future. Demand will set the price and events like football matches and concerts will be the preserve of the rich only.
Dynamic pricing for gigs such as Oasis is a complete joke. You can have someone at their computer 10 hours before the sale paying multiples of what someone who was at their computer 1 hour beforehans(which doesn’t happen with airlines and hotels for whoever insists it’s the same thing). Its meaningless and not based on demand, ultimately its Ticketmasters algorithm deciding that you’re simply going to have to pay more because of where you were assigned in the queue.
Hopefully the EU do something about it. Can’t stop bands demanding ridiculous amounts of cash, but don’t force someone to pay way more than they should. Have the ticket prices posted 48 hours before sale so people know what they should expect.
It won't change the end result but agreed it would be more up front.
True, but it pisses on that marketing model and disrupts it. It will probably end up akin to fuel pricing but in this case you'll get to see the ticket pricing and availability in advance, ie:
7,000 standing at 80 EUR 500 standing at 180 EUR 20,000 seated at 120 EUR 25,000 seated at 170 EUR 3,000 seated at 210 EUR
…and so on. It's then still stinks but at least it's up-front.
It will be very amusing to see reactions if it comes out that only a tiny % of tickets were dynamically priced and people will have to find something else to get their knickers in a twist about.
so make it illegal
this maximum monetization method escalates greed, the consumer gets gamed and screwed while big business highfives
and yet again with all things that go digital it becomes a 1 or 0, winners and losers, haves vs have nots
also the Gallagher gobshites can stfu now with any claims they're of the working classes because they're 100% in on it
pure profit and greed
that's my opinion
