There’s a new schism opening in rock and pop music. It’s not sexy. But it lays down clear dividing lines between two distinct musical camps: to use surge pricing or not?
Surge pricing is the system whereby concert tickets shoot up in price when demand is high. In the yes camp – as evidenced by widespread ticket chaos over the weekend – are Oasis, the Britpop rabble-rousers who are playing 17 vast outdoor concerts on a much-hyped reunion tour next summer. The Gallagher brothers join the likes of Bruce Springsteen and Beyoncé in adopting the controversial music industry practice.
In the no camp sit Taylor Swift, Crowded House and Paul Heaton, the Beautiful South and Housemartins singer. At stake is a lot of money and a sense of goodwill among fans.
Oasis caused controversy on Saturday when an estimated 1.4 million tickets went on sale for their Oasis Live 25 shows. Despite the band clearly setting out the face value of the various tiers of tickets last week, some fans who had queued for hours on the Ticketmaster website were surprised to see tickets with an apparent face value of £135 ($285) being sold for £355 ($750).
The price wasn’t an illusion thanks to an excess consumption of cigarettes and alcohol as they had waited: Oasis had chosen to use so-called “in-demand” pricing, sending the cost skyrocketing.
For fans, it was a case of paying a fortune to see their favourite band or missing out. After spending hours waiting to get to the front of the queue, it seems many people paid more than they could afford – and more than they had planned – in the heat of the moment. Overdrafts are surely suddenly in use all around the country.
Pop fans believe that surge pricing is screwing them over. And the option to use it is completely down to the artist. Bruce Springsteen upset fans in 2022 when he used dynamic pricing for his 2023 US tour with the E Street Band. Some ticket prices rose to US$5000 ($8033). The Boss justified its use by saying that for nearly half a century he had priced his tickets at “under market value” and that he was simply following a trend in the concert industry. “This time I told [fans], ‘Hey, we’re 73 years old … I want to do what everybody else is doing, my peers,” Springsteen said at the time.
Rock band Crowded House, on the other hand, have fought back against surge pricing. In 2020 the band didn’t realise that tickets for their tour were subject to it. We “had no prior knowledge of these ‘in demand’ tickets and did not approve this programme”, they said. So Crowded House demanded that promoter Live Nation reimburse ticket-holders who had paid more than face value.
Crowded House have announced their Gravity Stairs Tour for November 2024.
Another refusenik is Heaton, who’s playing a largely sold-out UK arena tour for a flat rate of £35 ($74) a ticket this autumn. “Some bands are really taking the mick,” he told me in July about concert prices in general.
Oasis were approached for comment on their ticket sales (the tour sold out).
A spokesperson for Ticketmaster said the company has no say over prices. “All ticket prices, including Platinum, In Demand, and VIP, are set by the tour,” the spokesperson said. However, it won’t have escaped fans’ notice that Ticketmaster is owned by Live Nation, which is one of the promoters for the Oasis tour.
One veteran music industry insider who has worked with global bands for decades says that Springsteen and Oasis use dynamic pricing because it reflects supply and demand in the industry, and is perfectly legal. “But,” he adds ominously, “I’m worried it will put people off buying tickets.”
Dynamic pricing is based on simple economics: high demand means prices rise while – technically – lower demand means prices fall. Concerts in the UK are relatively new to it. It’s been used by taxi company Uber, as anyone trying to get around on a Friday night or during the week before Christmas will tell you, for a while. Likewise property rental company Airbnb (property owners can set a price range in its version of dynamic pricing – the company calls it “Smart Pricing”) and airline EasyJet. Some UK pubs have even started charging more for drinks during the busiest times of the week, adding to the price of a pint over the weekend.
But surge pricing on concert tickets is a particularly controversial subsection of dynamic pricing. This is because high demand for tickets is usually utterly predictable while the number of outlets through which tickets are sold is extremely limited. Also, the surge price isn’t flagged until after the fan has got through the queue – they don’t know the price they’re paying until they’re committed to the process.
It was screamingly obvious that demand for Oasis tickets would be through the roof, and so it proved: 10 million people from 158 countries tried to get their hands on 1.4 million tickets. At first glance, this suggests that the odds of getting a ticket stood at one in seven.
But fans were allowed to buy up to four tickets each, further decreasing the pool of available tickets for others. If all 1.4 million tickets were sold in batches of four (this obviously wasn’t the case but it illustrates the paltry odds), this would have meant that only 350,000 fans actually bought tickets. Yet despite this demand, only three websites – Ticketmaster, Gigs and Tours, and See Tickets – were selling the tickets and the band still opted to use surge pricing on Ticketmaster, which is owned by Live Nation and was also approached for comment.
Speaking on the Today programme on Monday morning, an executive at so-called “secondary” ticketing site Viagogo – a site that resells tickets that have already been bought, and is usually the bogeyman of the ticketing ecosystem – came across as the voice of reason. Matt Drew said the weekend’s events are an example of “closed dynamic pricing” with “zero transparency” where there’s “no competition”. “The effect is that the fans have to pay any price that the primary seller is putting out there,” Drew said. He added that at least with taxis and airlines there’s “open competition” and “multiple points of sale”, which help to push prices down. Oasis fans who got through on Saturday after hours of waiting had no such option to shop around.
Oasis have urged fans not to buy from resale sites, warning that those tickets would be cancelled. Photo / Getty Images
There’s an irony here. Dynamic pricing was actually invented to reduce gig ticket prices. It was first used by Ticketmaster in the US in 2011 as a means of filling concert seats and stoking demand following a global slowdown in ticket sales after the banking crisis. Concerts that didn’t sell would get a price cut but at least the seats would be full. “Expect lower prices this year,” wrote the Los Angeles Times. But the good times are back, and surge pricing now works the other way. Prices shoot up.
Bands justify it in other ways beyond “because it’s there”. If tickets are going to be resold at inflated prices on the secondary market anyway – either by AI scalpers known as “bots”, unscrupulous fans, or fans who genuinely can’t make the show – then artists say they might as well take that revenue for themselves via dynamic pricing. As Springsteen put it: “The ticket broker or someone is going to be taking that money. I’m going, ‘Hey, why shouldn’t that money go to the guys that are going to be up there sweating three hours a night for it?’”
However, this argument doesn’t quite hold water in Ireland, where ticket touting has been against the law since 2021 and where surge pricing has nonetheless been applied by Oasis. (The band have urged fans not to buy from resale sites, warning that those tickets would be cancelled.)
But surge pricing could soon be a thing of the past. After the Oasis debacle Lisa Nandy, the Culture Secretary, announced that the UK Government will review dynamic pricing. It wants to put fans back “at the heart of music,” Nandy said.
For the moment, though, Oasis ticket-holders will be hoping for a hell of a show. High prices come with high expectations. No pressure, Liam and Noel.
