Oasis - The Drink, The Band, The Dynamic Pricing

No great shocker but apparently Oasis are planning another two nights at Wembley in September 25 that will not be affected by dynamic pricing and will be on offer first to people that were unsuccessful at the weekend: don’t know if that means the people who didn’t get a presale link cos with the amount of people online on Saturday, there’s no way they could have recorded who they were. After seeing god knows how many sh*te pictures and memes people have shared since Saturday, the excitement is rapidly wearing off for me.

Would you make auctions illegal too ? 

You go to an auction with the expectation of potentially getting into a bidding war. People were joining the Oasis queue thinking they had selected ~£150 tickets only to get to checkout hours later and find they had been altered to ~£350. I think that should be illegal, yes. 

People are being naive if they think banning dynamic or surge pricing will lead to cheaper tickets, it won't. It'll just mean more tickets will be priced at higher price bands.

😆 ‘Once they got wind’….once it became clear that the bad publicity was not going away, you mean.

Of course the band knew that they had agreed to dynamic pricing! Management teams are there to take the blame when stuff goes wrong like this, so they are claiming innocence, but if you believe they hadn’t been told how much more money could be made by allowing it then I have a bridge to sell you.

Excluding it will not become standard practice, because it is designed to wring as much money as possible out of the people who can afford it, who are happy to drop £500 on a gig ticket at the last minute and would otherwise buy from a tout.

The problem here was that there was not enough supply at the standard price on sale day, so instead of those prices appearing only to very rich people browsing for a ticket a few weeks before the show who expected and were able to pay that much it showed up for die-hard fans in the on-sale queue.

The pricing has also served as a deflection from all of Ticketmaster's IT issues that have been ongoing for decades. I still have mental scars from the 2012 Olympics sales that were riddled with bugs, including, as I witnessed with my own eyes three times, swapping the cheap tickets already in your basket with much more expensive ones at the final stage without any on-screen notification apart from a crafty switch to the amount to be charged. (I took screen shots of the process once, but never got anywhere with an official complaint.) Quite how they suffered no penalty for their handling of the Olympics is a mystery.

With Oasis, there has been talk of "unprecedented demand", but that's no excuse at all. They operate the queue; they control the inflow rate from the queue; they have full control over the number of concurrent users and can cap it at whatever capacity they can safely manage.

Problems that have existed for years and they continue to get away with:
- Human buyers thrown out of queues for no reason, usually just as they've reached the end of it;
- Human buyers wrongly identified as bots;
- Human buyers geo-blocked simply because they had the audacity to be abroad on holiday at the time of sale;
- Human buyers blocked because they are at work and using a VPN or sharing an IP address that Ticketmaster has decided it doesn't like;
- Regular server errors;
- Regular time-outs;
- Regular payment failures;
- Loads of coding bugs that do things like change prices mid-transaction, assign the same ticket to two different users, or simply encounter an uncoded-for error;
- Displaying ticket availability information that is already several minutes out of date, so lots of phantom availability;
- Rarely allowing specific seat selection (which even my PL football club allows in mass peak sales);
- Not providing any practicable customer service;
- Charging excessive amount for simply providing a ticket and taking payment.

I can only assume the ticketing industry is making sizeable donations to political parties to explain why it remains so badly regulated.

Simple solution if people want to keep Dynamic Pricing is to just ban dynamic pricing upwards; keep it if to enable seats to be sold for less (eg. Theatre: to clear unsold seats etc), but never sold for more.

Boom!

Oasis and to be fair others appear innocent and have distanced themselves from any involvement, of things like bots snapping up tickets and resale sites - I don’t think they’re innocent at all and I in the thick of it. Just as Hamilton was when it first played Broadway.

That's exactly it though, in a long running production with 8 shows per week I can understand some fluctuation in ticket prices. You're going to have busy weeks and quiet weeks, Mondays vs weekends etc.

With a concert, you aren't going to have that. It was a guaranteed sell from day one, they didn't need to start fiddling with prices once thousands of people had already joined the online queue.

One commentator on TV (was it Richard Tice?) stupidly compared it to how flight prices vary drastically. I mean sure, but there are thousands of flights per day, every day of the year. You don't have thousands of people in an online queue all trying to get on one specific flight do you?

EDIT: One thing I'd like to add on to that which I think is also terrible, is when people have pre-booked hotels since before the event was announced, and then have their bookings cancelled by the hotel so that they'll have to re-book at the higher rate they're now charging because of the concerts. Ok, I understand them putting up prices while the concert is there, but kicking people out who have already booked just to squeeze every penny out says a lot about what they think of their customers.

mkb the ticketing industry political lobby group is called
“Coalition for Ticketing Fairness.”

And of course it is set up to guarantee the opposite!

Gold medal for this thread name

I'd seen about the investigation news which will definitely be interesting. Dynamic pricing or at least what I interpret to be it has dissuaded me from seeing a fair few concerts.

Ticketmaster should maybe "dynamically raise" their budget to sort out other problems like the fact I get kicked out every few minutes because my network speed is... like... suspiciously fast or something???

As someone who uses a VPN as well for safety when working and using public transport it is bloody annoying to be told that I'm a robot all the time. Despite my username