Oasis fans were angry at TICKET BATS leaving them
Surge pricing in the band Oasis (aka The band I Wanna see) – the band is on tour in 2025
The British government has pledged to look into the use of dynamic pricing for tickets after fans were priced out of the band’s surprise reunion tour. The UK’s advertising regulator told BBC News it had received 450 complaints regarding misleading ticket prices and availability, with many tickets more than doubling in price. Thousands of hopeful buyers spent the day in online lines as sales began and sold out within hours.
Surge pricing is a system that pushes higher prices for products as demand increases. The practice does not break any British law, but was criticized for restricting access to music, sports, and theater events in the Labour party constitution before it became a government.
Oasis, the band everyone likes to sing after too many pints at karaoke, is going on tour. It isn’t actually on tour, but 17 dates in the UK and Ireland in summer 2025. The band broke up in 2009, and this is still a major deal for most people. Hardcore fans of the band would hate to miss out on that, especially if the band’s leaders, the always-feuding brothers Liam and Noel, throttle each other at any given moment.
Did a band sell out of tickets during the weekend of July 24th? Reports of Fabre, Fabre and the Ticketmaster Redux
Benjamin Fabre, the founder of cyberfraud firm DataDome says that efforts like presale ballots are helpful in stemming the immediate rush associated with ticket sales but are not perfect solutions against sophisticated bot attacks.
Not all of the inflated ticket prices were the result of bots, however. After waiting hours in the queue, some fans reached the front only to find the price of tickets had more than doubled. This was due to dynamic pricing, a model that means the prices of tickets can change if there’s high demand. Fans urged bands and artists to fight against dynamic pricing as tickets started to sell out on Saturday. There wasn’t a response fromTicketmaster over the weekend regarding this story.
Fans had to fill out a ballot and correctly answer questions about the band to be part of the pre-sale. Others received a link for the pre-sale, others didn’t and were devastated, expecting a “Ticketmaster bloodbath” during the general on-sale despite the fact that Oasis had warned that tickets for more than face value would be canceled.
As soon as the presale for the band’s upcoming gigs went online on Friday, tickets—which started at around $100 apiece—popped up on resale sites, with fans on X reporting that they were seeing prices in the $800 to $1,200 range, despite the fact that the band said it had put guardrails in place to prevent the cost of the tickets from getting out of hand. The BBC reported that some tickets were going for as much as $7,800.