Scandal erupts in Britain over overpriced Oasis concert tickets
Hours-long queues, sharp price hikes and speculation. A scandal has erupted in the UK over Oasis concerts. Fans' delight at the reunion of the Gallagher brothers has given way to indignation, Variety writes. Last weekend, ticket sales for the British band's performances next summer opened. The legendary band broke up in 2009, and a week ago Liam and Noel Gallagher announced their reconciliation and reunion of Oasis. Fans sold out tickets for all 17 concerts of the UK and Ireland tour in ten hours. Many online ticket offices stopped working, unable to cope with the load.
Fans spent hours in online queues on aggregator sites. Over time, the price jumped from £148 to more than double, exceeding £350 (more than 40 thousand rubles). Online cash registers explained the dynamic pricing by increased demand.
The services themselves were quick to absolve themselves of responsibility, Sky News correspondent Alice Porter said: "This past weekend was incredibly frustrating for a lot of people. They spent hours in online queues, hunting for concert tickets, and suddenly the prices skyrocketed by more than double. This is dynamic pricing, which is often driven by demand. It is popular in the States when people try to buy tickets for concerts of famous bands. And now it has reached the UK.
Most aggregator sites insist that they do not set prices, but that it is the responsibility of the group, managers, agents. And they, in turn, defend dynamic pricing. But this causes confusion among owners of online ticket offices and ticket sales services."
Fans wanting to buy tickets at the originally advertised price filed complaints with the UK Advertising Standards Authority. The agency received over 400 requests over the weekend. In addition, when tickets ran out on official websites, fans turned to resale services. The price on these sites reached several thousand pounds.
Ildar Bakeev, producer of the Ildar Bakeev Entertainment promoter company, does not consider this sales scheme to be fraudulent: "The prices for concert tickets are set by the organizer, who is by definition a businessman. The businessman's task is to make money, but to guess the price so that all the tickets are sold. A full house is the desire of any artist.
The fact that prices increase is normal, it is the law of the market. If there is demand, then there is a shortage of tickets, then the price will increase. This strategy is initially built into dynamic pricing.
If scalpers buy up most of the tickets, taking advantage of the fact that they have money, this will, of course, offend the fans, so some methods are needed to regulate the price.”
The UK Department of Culture has promised to check dynamic pricing on aggregator sites. This includes investigating cases of fraud in resale and ensuring that citizens get tickets at fair prices.
This is not about reducing the cost, but about transparency of pricing, says Alexandra Zvyagintseva, head of market research at Digital & Analogue Partners: “Dynamic pricing is a legal mechanism, they do not try to regulate it. Except for cases when it is used by a monopoly company and uses some opaque algorithms inside that mislead consumers.
In this case, what the UK wants is to increase transparency for users, so that they understand how prices are formed, so that they have more information about what price they can expect during periods of increased demand. Regulators do not have any tools to force private companies to reduce ticket prices.
The market for tickets to music concerts is competitive, and the state cannot interfere and dictate what prices to set, since this is not a product of natural monopolies.
In Russia, the system works similarly, that is, many companies use dynamic pricing for air and train tickets, hotels. The mechanism itself is absolutely legal, but the state also monitors this so that the algorithm is more transparent for users, and there is no situation where several companies occupy the entire market, and they have a way to collude with each other."
According to calculations made at the University of Birmingham, the Gallagher brothers will earn over £400 million during their tour of Great Britain and Ireland. As the British media emphasize, these concerts will bring Oasis more money than their performances during the entire 1990s.
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