For die-hard fans like the Guardian’s North of England editor, Josh Halliday, the news that Oasis was reforming for a series of gigs had them racing to their laptops to buy tickets. But with a handful of dates announced and a fever pitch of excitement for the concerts, when the tickets were finally released many people found themselves waiting for hours in online queues.
Josh queued for more than five hours – but when he got the chance to buy tickets he was one of the many fans who found the only ones available had been marked as “in demand” and priced at more than £300 – far more than the £135 he had been expecting to pay. Afterwards, “there wasn’t that kind of elation that you would expect to get, when you’ve bought Oasis tickets after six hours of trying. It was like: ‘What have I done?’”
The Guardian reporter Rob Davies has been looking into the pricing of concert tickets for some time, and wasn’t surprised by what unfolded. He tells Helen Pidd how Ticketmaster, the company that sold so many of the tickets for the Oasis gigs, has begun using “dynamic pricing”. And he explains why the high cost of seeing the Gallagher brothers perform is likely to be just the start of rising costs for music fans.
Photograph: Fabio Diena/Alamy
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