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A furore has raged in Britain and elsewhere this week after some fans of Oasis, the Britpop band staging a reunion, queued online for hours only to confront prices hundreds of pounds higher than advertised. That’s nothing, US fans of Bruce Springsteen might say. In 2022, some seeking tickets to see the “Boss” found remaining seats priced up to $5,000. Both cases featured “dynamic pricing” by sales giant Ticketmaster, which boosts costs of heavily in-demand tickets in real time. Ageing rockers fondly recall the days of camping overnight for tickets, when at least they knew they would pay face value.
Some of the 10mn fans from 158 countries who joined the Oasis queue were having their first encounter with dynamic pricing — long established, and controversial, in the US for both music and sports events. Ticketmaster says it aims to prevent touts or scalpers scooping up tickets and reselling them at monster mark-ups. Bands or sports events themselves can capture some of the extra margin instead.
After the Springsteen affair and a fiasco when Ticketmaster’s website crashed as thousands of fans tried to buy Taylor Swift tickets, US legislators introduced various bills — including a Boss and Swift Act — aimed at regulating ticket sales. The US justice department, meanwhile, launched an antitrust lawsuit in May seeking to break up Live Nation, a promoter that owns many venues and acquired Ticketmaster in 2011, alleging it “suffocates competition” in live entertainment more broadly, which Live Nation rejects.
Britain’s new Labour government has leapt on the bandwagon, with ministers pledging to ensure tickets are sold at “fair prices”; the UK competition authority is looking into the Oasis sale. It is reasonable for competition watchdogs to ensure consumers are treated fairly. But politicians should surely not be seeking to ban dynamic pricing as some in Ireland, also hosting Oasis concerts, are now advocating.
Dynamic or surged pricing is, at root, a legitimate way to maximise revenues, employed in ever more sophisticated ways by everyone from airlines to ride-hailing apps. But the lesson of the gig ticket brouhahas is that sellers of goods and services need to beware of a brand-tarnishing backlash if they deploy systems that consumers perceive as untransparent or price-gouging.
Technology, however, is also opening up ways other than dynamic pricing to thwart touts — including systems designed to confine sales to genuine fans and exclude bots. Some experts say sellers could put scalpers out of business by putting buyers’ names on tickets, as airlines do.
For artists, who depend on keeping their fan base happy, whether to embrace dynamic pricing is already a matter of choice. Some, such as Ed Sheeran and The Cure, have rejected it in the past. Oasis, which had signalled a robust anti-tout stance when launching its reunion concerts, insisted this week its promoters and management had agreed ticket arrangements with Ticketmaster and the band itself “at no time had any awareness that dynamic pricing was going to be used”.
Artists who eschew dynamic pricing can still boost receipts through traditional price segmentation — premium pricing for seats with the best views or other benefits and for hospitality packages. They could ensure perceptions of fairness among fans by selling most tickets for fixed prices via a ballot, like some sporting events.
That may leave some money on the table. But if maximum profit were the sole motive, a band could in theory put on a single, closed-doors gig and auction tickets to the highest global bidders — at risk of enraging the fan base. And while there are practical limits to how many events artists can stage, where demand is sky-high there is another way to boost the take: by, as Oasis is now doing, playing extra dates.
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