Hundreds lodge complaints over Oasis ticket prices
Hundreds of Oasis fans have made official complaints about how tickets for the band’s reunion tour were advertised, as the government pledged to look into the use of “dynamic pricing”.
The system led the prices for many tickets to shoot up by more than £200 during the day after they went on sale on Saturday, leaving some fans out of pocket and others forced to give up.
Ministers have now said they will include dynamic pricing in a consultation into ticket resale websites, which had already been announced by the government and will start in the autumn.
Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy said she wants to end “rip-off resales” and ensure tickets are sold “at fair prices”.
On Ticketmaster, the cost of some tickets rose to more than £350 – up from £135 when the sale began on Saturday.
Ticketmaster said the prices were set by the “event organiser”, who “has priced these tickets according to their market value”.
Dynamic pricing is not a new phenomenon and is allowed under consumer protection laws.
Some tickets were also quickly listed on resale websites for thousands of pounds.
Ms Nandy said it was “depressing to see vastly inflated prices excluding ordinary fans” from gigs.
Outlining the government review’s scope, she said ministers would look at “issues around the transparency and use of dynamic pricing, including the technology around queuing systems which incentivise it”.
Fellow minister Lucy Powell, leader of the House of Commons, was among those hit by dynamic pricing over the weekend. She eventually forked out more than double the original quoted cost of a ticket for an Oasis show.
She told BBC Radio 5 Live that she did not “particularly like” surge pricing, but that “it is the market and how it operates”.
On Monday, the Advertising Standards Authority said it had received 450 complaints saying the adverts for what tickets would cost and how many were available were misleading.
“We’re carefully assessing these complaints and, as such, can’t comment any further at this time,” an ASA spokesperson said.
“To emphasise, we are not currently investigating these ads.”
Supply and demand
One fan, Jamie Moore, told the BBC he had never felt “so let down by a website” in his life.
Oasis and the band’s promoter have not responded to the complaints.
Schellion Horn, competition economist at accounting firm Grant Thornton, told the BBC’s Today programme that dynamic pricing was about setting the price around supply and demand.
That means as demand for tickets goes up, then the price rises to match that.
Ms Horn suggested there was a “realisation that actually the tickets were under priced” when the sale first started on Saturday, given there was so many people in online queues.
People were “clearly willing to pay prices of £300-£400”, she added, otherwise they would not have parted with their money.
But she said the problem was people were not aware that dynamic pricing was in operation and so there was a lack of transparency.
“We see it all the time, whether it’s Uber or airline tickets or holidays or train tickets, so we’re very very used to dynamic pricing…but I think this was the first time we’ve really seen it for concert tickets in the UK and people just weren’t expecting it and I think that’s where the issue came in,” she said.
Meanwhile, ticketing websites were praised for coping with the “enormous demand” for Oasis tickets by Jonathan Brown, chief executive of the Society of Ticket Agents and Retailers, who insisted prices would have been set by the band.
Ms Nandy said if the government worked with “artists, industry and fans, we can create a fairer system that ends the scourge of touts, rip-off resales and ensures tickets at fair prices”.
Before he became prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer backed a move to introduce a cap on prices for resold tickets and limits to how many tickets a person can resell.
During a speech in March, he said access to culture could not be “at the mercy of ruthless ticket touts who drive up the prices”.