My younger son returned from the Reading festival a couple of weekends ago, clutching a bag of dirty washing and the remains of a tent. He’d caught the sun, his voice was gravelly from all the singing he’d been doing and he was heading off to bed for a 16-hour sleep, but he had time to tell me about the highlights of the trip.
Gerry Cinnamon was brilliant, as were Catfish and the Bottlemen, but his eyes lit up when he talked about Liam Gallagher, who’d topped the bill on the last night. He loved the songs, the communal singing, the chat between Liam and the crowd and, best of all, pictures of Liam and Noel together were being shown on the giant video screen – meaning the reunion was on, it was happening. Oasis were going to reform, play some dates and both my sons had to be there, given that the last time Oasis had played together as a band my boys were two and five respectively.
Their enthusiasm for Oasis reminded me of my own nearly 30 years ago. I saw the brothers in 1996, at the height of Britpop and it was at Maine Road, the then home of Manchester City. There were 40 thousand people there, Noel played his Union Jack guitar, Liam smoked on stage and the night started with the “Swamp Song” and finished with “Cum on Feel the Noize”. I’ve always kept a diary so I dug out what I’d written for 28 April that year; it won’t win any awards for creative writing, but I loved the night and I may have used the word “ace”.
I’m happy we’re a music family; we go to plenty of gigs and I admire that my sons’ generation just loves good music, they don’t care how trendy or old it is. My older boy loves Elbow almost as much as he loves Taylor Swift and my youngest will have Drake and Billy Ocean on the same playlist. So Operation Oasis was planned for the Derbyshire household on Saturday morning.
We all registered, we all did the anti-bot questionnaire, we checked that our account details for Ticketmaster were up to date and working. We set alarms (my sons are 17 and 20 – getting up as early as 8am on a Saturday is still a bit of an effort) and settled down to join the queues at 9am, a bit annoyed that already pre-sale tickets were being resold on secondary sites before the rest of us were even allowed to try.
You’ll know the stories by now – getting chucked off the site (tick), being told you are 412,000 in the queue (tick), getting as far as trying to buy tickets but being told they are no longer available (tick) and finally, finding out that the already-steep £150 tickets are now £355 and seated tickets were nearly £500. The tickets were being described on the site as “in demand” – well thanks for that Ticketmaster, I’d never have worked that out. It was “dynamic pricing” in action.
Apparently the logic is that increasing prices for high-demand tickets will put off touts and the artists get the extra profit, rather than organised opportunists looking to cash in. Bruce Springsteen – who, like the Gallaghers, has a blue collar man-of-the-people image, backed the argument when he allowed it for his US tour last year: “Hey, why shouldn’t that money go to the guys that are going to be up there sweating three hours a night for it?” he said.
I suppose it is up to you whether you feel better knowing all that extra cash is going to the band, but either way the customer loses with what could be seen as “official” touting. The former CEO of Ticketmaster, Fred Rosen, said after the controversy surrounding the sale of Taylor Swift tickets: “I have no sympathy for people whining about high ticket prices … They helped create this situation where artists have to make all their money on tour.”
So it’s our fault – and the ticket agencies argue that we accept dynamic pricing in other aspects of our lives. Just look at the cost of booking a holiday when the schools are off – so why is this any different? Part of the argument might be that if I want to go on holiday to Spain and airline A’s tickets are too expensive, I can usually try Airline B or C. But it’s not the same with gig tickets.
Why don’t the ticket agencies tell us in advance that the prices originally displayed are just a guide? The tickets definitely won’t be cheaper than that, but they may be three or four times higher. Or they could tell us not to try at all early on as that means they’ll be “in demand”- sure, you can always try a week next Tuesday, they might advise, but they’ll probably be so “in demand” there won’t be any left.
Or perhaps artists could issue a statement saying they have agreed to “dynamic pricing” and it’s because they want the extra money and don’t want touts getting their hands on it. For a lot of us, not getting a ticket is one thing – that’s the way it goes, it’s the luck of the draw, but finding out that I might get a ticket but it will cost me a fortune and I’ll only find that the actual price when I get to the checkout feels a bit, well, sneaky. Legal, yes, but not fair.
I’m sure that the bad feelings will have long since disappeared by the time the band takes to the stage next summer. And I’ll try not to be too cheesed off that we won’t be there for what will be great gigs and a huge communal event. The Taylor Swift experience in America sparked a political debate and talk of law changes, and I’m glad that the Government here will at least look at the situation, if not ban it.
But no matter how much we love an artist, however close we feel to them, however many memories we feel we’ve shared, Oasis or Bruce or Taylor don’t owe us anything and if we have a problem with that, we can always go and see someone else.
Victoria Derbyshire is a journalist, broadcaster and host of BBC Newsnight and Ukrainecast
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