I’m not buying Oasis tickets – but after all these years and knowing what’s going to happen. Hasn’t technology evolved to a point where they can make sure that everything works OK? Is it really such an unsolvable problem?
I know that they will want to sell more pricey hospitality packages to desperate people but is slow web sites and panic buying *really* the business model?
The ticketmaster bot is doing her best.
Given that TM insists its per person ticket allowances and moving barcode have made selling/transfering tickets next to impossible, it follows that all those over-priced tickets that are cropping up on sites like StubHub must either be scams or illegally obtained.
While this happens every time TM tickets a big event, doubt that the resulting level of outrage from – understandably – pissed-off fans will have ever reached the levels seen today
Be interesting to see how TM addresses how all these tickets are being scalped on secondary sites when they are forced to issue a statement.
‘While this happens every time TM tickets a big event, doubt that the resulting level of outrage from – understandably – pissed-off fans will have ever reached the levels seen today’
Swifties – “Hold my Prosecco”.
We didn’t call it The Great War for nothing. 🤔
Swifties – “Hold my Prosecco”.
Barman: – ‘Certainly. I wasn’t going to serve you anyway, you’re not legally old enough
to drink”
The difficulty and uncertainty involved in buying tickets from Ticketmaster for a major event or concert makes it easier for them to inflate prices. It’s not in their interest, or those of greedy artists, to make it really simple.
They start off by selling tickets at certain prices that they know will be profitable, expecting them to sell out quickly, but they hold a proportion of the tickets back, to see what the market is like and the sort of prices that they fetch from resellers like StubHub. They then release a second batch at prices approaching what the resellers are asking. Sometimes they’ll do it again with a third batch, if the second batch are selling as quickly as the first.
Meanwhile, the delays onsite before you can buy are because each transaction has to be verified by the customer’s bank, as part of their fraud prevention processes. They need to verify that there are funds available for the purchase and that the person buying is actually the account-holder. The process isn’t particularly fast anyway and dealing with thousands of new transactions all at the same time makes it go even slower.
Oddly just got an email from TM announcing future events, including a play I’d quite like to see.
Click on the link for the play, and, despite what eading Irish newspaper sites full of stories about aggrieved punters who missed out are saying, you end up in the queue for Oasis tickets with a blurb on the page saying:
“Tickets for Oasis are still available, but inventory is now limited and not all ticket prices are available.”
Just heard a woman on the bus complaining that she had been in the queue for tickets (and thus checking her phone constantly, using up 4GB of data, which most concerned her) for three hours, and was apparently no closer to actually buying a ticket. Looking online, it seems like she’s not the only one.
I get that demand far exceeds the supply of tickets, but should the purchase process be such an ordeal? I’ve no interest in Oasis, but even if I did, I would have given up long before three hours had passed.
In passing, I heard the woman say, “I was willing to pay £300 for a ticket, but now this is getting ridiculous.” I wanted to reply, “£300!!!? To see Oasis???!” Do thousands of people really have that sort of spare cash to spend to stand in a stadium for a couple of hours?
While I’d baulk at paying that amount myself, if you really, really wanted to get your hands on a ticket for a gig/play/sporting event and could afford it, £300 doesn’t seem that expensive.
I think the £300 is not to see Oasis but to say that you were there.
A wise observation, HR
True, but why not just say “I was there”.
Who could refute it?
Totting up the cost of that… and… it’s coming… the cost of that was the square root of zilch.
‘Brilliant wasn’t it! Bangers. The singer with his arms behind his back, the older one with a guitar, erm, standing still. Anoraks. Choons. Mancs coking it up all around me, crying. Wouldn’t have missed it for the world”.
If you can’t post wobbly video clips and dodgy selfies, nobody’s going to believe you were there. Fact!
Better than that, grab some screen caps of frozen TM screens from X and the front pages of the tabloids and claim you spent a far from glorious Saturday morning in the queue for tickets.
Nobody is using up 4gb of data in a queue for tickets, unless they are live streaming it.
I’m glad there are no longer many artists I need to see, and if I do, they play smaller venues. It doesn’t look like Donald Fagen will be going out again, Dave Stewart will NOT rejoin H&TN, nor will Steve Howe bury the hatchet with Jon Anderson and Rick Wakeman. Prefab Sprout will not play again, I suspect. I think the only (to me) “big gig” might be if Beat play the UK next year, when adrian belew, tony levin, and steve vai (and the drummer form Tool) play 80s King Crimson. I rather fancy that.
I quite fancy the 80s King Crimson but only if they roll their jacket sleeves up.
The more they roll them up, the more I like it
They will, I’m sure. And the audience certainly will.
Agreed.
Would rather go and see an act like Phosphorescent in a small club than go to some big enormodome extravaganza.
While one shouldn’t laugh, it’s amusing to hear stories of oldies whingeing about missing out because of younger fans who weren’t there first time around
These are massive stadium gigs, tickets will probably be available later. Best bet is book a refundable hotel room before the sale, ignore the day of the sale and keep checking periodically. Tickets may well show up and especially late on when the stage is set up they will know better the sightlines, pit capacity etc and more tickets will be released often at lower prices. For me the days of panicking to get tickets on day of sale are over.
They do appear to be learning though. Often big sales like this happen on a Friday and mess up the sales of smaller gigs. At least they’ve chosen a Saturday.
They should also stagger the days/times of sale so that not all gigs in the tour go on sale at the same time. Over here it’s normally at 10am, but there are different time zones so not all dates in a tour would be on sale at the same time.
My cousin got through after 7 hours to be offered standing tickets at Wembley for 350 quid each, others got them for 150. This flex pricing really should be outlawed, legalized touting.
The system of booking for The Eras Tour was intended to prevent this mad free-for-all, with an album presale, registration of interest for each venue prior to a random allocation of codes giving access to the precious sale, and leaving everyone else on the ‘waitlist’. They also had staggered sale days and times the different dates.
It certainly didn’t operate as smoothly as the agencies would have liked, certainly in America, where lawsuits were instigated and raised in the Senate, but at least they tried to make that process a little more seemly and less painful.
That’s an option that, in this case, would have been hard on the Uber fans who already have all the albums.
Otherwise I think it’s a good idea when a tour supports an album (although I’m not sure if it’s that way round!). Other bands have done it on a smaller scale.
Irish fans pissed off being charged E415 – before fees – for E176 standing tickets in Croke Park.
The Guards may get involved…
https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/calls-for-investigation-into-ticketmaster-pricing-after-irish-oasis-fans-left-infuriated-by-415-standing-tickets/a1920402076.html
Oh for the days when I just sent off a postal order to buy tickets.
I am still mad that I don’t get Bowie tickets in 83, postal order (cheque) returned
Or went to an actual Box Office.
Sleeping all night on the street in the queue? You tell kids that these days and they won’t believe you…
@Dai
Warned you not to sell all your medals from the Punk Wars of 76 and 77 to buy that Wilco box set, D…
Friday afternoon after school to Sunday morning actually. Front row seats for the Fabs, 1963.
Good job!
The night of Saturday May 6 1978 , Romilly Street, Soho in that London. Tickets for Dylan’s Earls Court concerts went on sale from the Palace Theatre box office on the Sunday morning. Mainly remember how uncomfortable sleeping in the road was and curious, pissed up Ipswich fans celebrating their FA cup win earlier that day.
Well, they sold 1.4 million tickets in ten hours, which suggests that they do know how to sell tickets.
Putting them all of the tickets on the market in one go was a clever bit of PR – it got the concerts on the news. I don’t think staggering the release would have got this high live of coverage. It’s hard to see that “Tickets are now available for the Cardiff Oasis concerts” would have been covered on the Today programme or six o’clock news. And they had reporters looking for stories about the online queues and disappointed punters. Even the flexible pricing (which looks like it was the choice of Oasis and their management) added to the stories about the high level of demand.
It’s show business.
^^^
In all the tumult and noise of the last few days this succinctly summarises the whole exercise perfectly
Problem is, the huge demand for tickets had been driven by the teases over the weekend and the announcements earlier in the week.
Rather than drive even more demand, all yesterday’s big hoo-hah achieved was to piss off an awful lot of people who couldn’t get/afford tickets and make L and G look greedy.
Seems extremely unlikely that anyone who was in two minds about whether to buy tickets would see yesterday’s wall-to-wall media coverage and think, I better get my arse. in that queue
By the time the media coverage was of the queue, it was too late to join it. If you were still in two minds then, you’d missed the boat.
It’s show business….but mostly it’s business. No one is forcing people to buy tickets and I don’t blame Oasis (or anyone) for making as much money as possible. I’m not sure I ‘like’ dynamic pricing, but it’s used in hotel and airline booking systems (and I’m sure elsewhere if I thought about it) and we accept that it is supply and demand which drives prices in a free market economy, but it is relatively novel in entertainment. My main beef is why they apparently can’t stop the bots and resellers getting hold of them…’Stop the Bots’ on a lectern, that’ll learn ‘em…
Not sure what possibilities there are for resales. Often now TM only allow resales on their site and not for a price lower than what they have the tickets currently on sale for. TM then get to take their cut twice. Genius!
I’ve just ordered a ticket for the Real People in Manchester in October. £20, no bots. That’ll learn them pesky ungrateful Gallagher brothers..
I got two tickets for Sunday Driver at the Blue Moon for half that, and they’re a seven-piece with a lot more instruments than L&G and their pals. No booking fees, either.
You don’t see Noel G playing an electric sitar or a bassoon, do you? Nor singing a song about an elephant in Hindi, come to think of it.
@fentonsteve
Give him a couple of weeks…