When is the price the PRICE?

Undoubtedly the biggest news of last week was the announcement of Oasis reforming to play a number of shows in the UK (which will undoubtedly spread across the globe). The level of both positive and negative feedback to this announcement has been interesting. For the diehard fans, who represent a broader span of age groups than you might think, it is something akin to the second coming. Whilst the band fell apart in 2009, they have remained in the public eye due to the much-reported animosity between the 2 key members Noel & Liam Gallagher. The fact that they have since formed separately successful bands in their own right - and that they would be unable to resist the millions they would earn from the tour, has kept them in the headlines.

Oasis’s first album – Definitely Maybe - was released on 29 August 1994, the week before I joined EMI Records and at the time it was the fastest-selling debut album in the UK. They undoubtedly had a huge impact on society and popular culture with their swagger, look and songwriting in a world which is only 30 years ago, but feels like 50. Their 2^nd album ‘Be Here Now’, became the 5^th biggest-selling album in chart history, to some degree driven by the rivalry generated by the British press when they released their ‘Roll with It’ single on the same day as Blur released ‘Country House’, which was won by the latter, who were signed to an EMI label. Since those heady days, the music industry has been on a roller coaster ride with the virtual extinction of physical product (vinyl really is very small) and the lack of attention given to chart and chart positions.

As well as through streaming, technology has had a huge impact on touring and ticket prices. I am fortunate to have seen most of my favourite artists perform and many of them for free. It never ceases to amaze me how expensive gig tickets have become and that’s even before the scammers have scalped a quantity for the secondary ticket market. A good friend of ours spent £1,000 per ticket for his partner and daughter to see Taylor Swift at Wembley! It is also worth noting that whilst the column inches are taken up with stories of excessive pricing, technology has made it much easier for promoters and theatres to make late tickets available at lower prices, so it’s not all doom and gloom, but it’s certainly not in balance.

The tickets for Oasis’s shows have been put on sale well almost a year in advance. This and the introduction of ‘Dynamic Pricing’ (introduced by Ticketmaster in 2022), has meant that fans have waited in online ticketing queues for hours at a time and watched the prices balloon, with reports that ‘Platinum’ tickets were over £6,000. This has led to calls for the whole ticketing system to be reviewed. It will be interesting to see how many shows the band end up playing, in 1996 the band played 2 shows at Knebworth to 250,000 people and Noel Gallagher revealed in a later documentary that they had sufficient demand for 7, there was no secondary ticketing in those days!

As a negotiator, on the relatively rare instance where I see an artist live, my first port of call is to assess the INTEND price (the price has been set by the promoter) and then a LIMIT beyond which I won’t pay if I have to use the secondary market or am subject to Dynamic Pricing. The latest example of this was Janet Jackson at the O2, INTEND £85, LIMIT £150 and by the time I made up my mind, the prices had gone to over £250. There is genuinely NO artist I would pay that money for, regardless of how much money the artist needs to pay for their latest divorce.