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Post by kathryn on Sept 3, 2024 22:43:40 GMT
I note that Oasis have not (yet) broken the records set by the Take That and Robbie Williams reunion back in 2011.
Taylor Swift didn’t even break their Wembley record (though she did match the number of nights there).
(It’d be incredibly funny to me if Oasis don’t break those records, given the hype and the incredibly obnoxious attitude they have displayed over the years to pop artists, but I expect they will put more dates on sale…)
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Post by Marwood on Sept 4, 2024 20:04:31 GMT
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.
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Post by talkingheads on Sept 4, 2024 21:29:11 GMT
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. Real slap in the face for those who paid well over the odds with dynamic pricing before these gigs were announced. |
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Post by Jan on Sept 5, 2024 7:13:32 GMT
Dynamic pricing is incomprehensible to me. Really should be illegal. Would you make auctions illegal too ? |
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Post by theglenbucklaird on Sept 5, 2024 7:20:05 GMT
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. Real slap in the face for those who paid well over the odds with dynamic pricing before these gigs were announced. The Gallagher boys, well their PR mob, have played a blinder here |
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Post by amyja89 on Sept 5, 2024 7:22:47 GMT
Dynamic pricing is incomprehensible to me. Really should be illegal. 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. |
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Post by Jan on Sept 5, 2024 7:45:04 GMT
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. Depends what you mean by "selected" - if you mean they put £150 tickets in their basket and then on checkout they were changed to £350 that's wrong but that's not actually what happened. What happened was that tickets were advertised from £150 but when people got into the system there weren't any available the price for them having been increased to £350, so they'd only "selected" the price they were willing to pay in their own mind. (This isn't actually dynamic pricing, it's surge pricing). If you ban dynamic pricing that means you ban lastminute.com who sell flights at lower prices than originally advertised for airlines who turn out to have spare capacity ? And you ban theatres papering ? |
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Post by aspieandy on Sept 5, 2024 8:39:21 GMT
Once they got wind, Oasis stopped it. Now it's out there, I imagine excluding dynamic pricing will become standard contractual practice in that industry.
Not a good way to treat your fans. The value is not all in a tour, it's in decades of fan engagement. This isn't Hollywood's Spiderman in the West End for 12 weeks, with the DP model already established (and built in to the pay structure).
Elite-level football is a similar market - tribal, loyalty, repeat business. Zero dynamic pricing in that industry.
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Post by mkb on Sept 5, 2024 11:01:59 GMT
Rather than banning selling tickets at excess prices, which could prove technically problematic, I'd favour:
- All event tickets must declare a face-value price;
- That value must be the full purchase cost, so must account for any unavoidable fees;
- Any amount charged on top of the face value is subject to a punitive tax rate, say 1,000%.
That would allow discounts, but make mark-ups uneconomic for most. It would have the advantage that people selling illegally could be done for the serious crime of tax evasion, and that would have a significant deterrent effect.
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Post by Jon on Sept 5, 2024 11:10:11 GMT
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.
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Post by aspieandy on Sept 5, 2024 11:50:19 GMT
Fwiw, I saw Slave Play at £9 on TodayTix at the end of last week, though none were left when I clicked through - price had then shot up 67% to £15.
Interesting how DP can work over an extended time rather than for a single concert - some ebb and flow.
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Post by kathryn on Sept 5, 2024 12:40:22 GMT
Once they got wind, Oasis stopped it. Now it's out there, I imagine excluding dynamic pricing will become standard contractual practice in that industry.
😆 ‘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. |
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Post by Jon on Sept 5, 2024 12:59:47 GMT
Once they got wind, Oasis stopped it. Now it's out there, I imagine excluding dynamic pricing will become standard contractual practice in that industry.
😆 ‘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. Back in the day, touts would charge a large markup because they knew there would be people desperate to see a band or a show and would be willing to pay over the odds. One of the first Broadway show to introduce premium pricing was either Miss Saigon where $100m tickets were available or The Producers and the main reason was that touts was making huge amounts of money and none of it was going into the pocket of the actual creatives and producers and by charging more, they were able to keep the money inhouse. |
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Post by mkb on Sept 5, 2024 13:11:34 GMT
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.
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Post by Jan on Sept 5, 2024 14:37:32 GMT
Rather than banning selling tickets at excess prices, which could prove technically problematic, I'd favour: - All event tickets must declare a face-value price; - That value must be the full purchase cost, so must account for any unavoidable fees; - Any amount charged on top of the face value is subject to a punitive tax rate, say 1,000%. That would allow discounts, but make mark-ups uneconomic for most. It would have the advantage that people selling illegally could be done for the serious crime of tax evasion, and that would have a significant deterrent effect. Discounts are not fair on people who have paid face value. If any discounts are offered people who have already paid face value should be reimbursed accordingly. |
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Post by nash16 on Sept 5, 2024 16:36:05 GMT
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!
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Post by Jon on Sept 5, 2024 16:47:19 GMT
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! The chances of that happening are zilch. It's a business after all. |
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Post by Phantom of London on Sept 5, 2024 17:19:02 GMT
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.
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Post by properjob on Sept 5, 2024 17:46:34 GMT
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Post by sph on Sept 5, 2024 17:56:27 GMT
Fwiw, I saw Slave Play at £9 on TodayTix at the end of last week, though none were left when I clicked through - price had then shot up 67% to £15.
Interesting how DP can work over an extended time rather than for a single concert - some ebb and flow.
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. |
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Post by Jon on Sept 5, 2024 18:12:29 GMT
The Government aren't going to do much to Ticketmaster, we saw that the US Senate couldn't do much to Ticketmaster when Taylor Swift put tickets on sale for the Eras Tour. |
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Post by kathryn on Sept 5, 2024 18:14:03 GMT
mkb the ticketing industry political lobby group is called “Coalition for Ticketing Fairness.” And of course it is set up to guarantee the opposite!
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Post by properjob on Sept 5, 2024 18:23:44 GMT
The Government aren't going to do much to Ticketmaster, we saw that the US Senate couldn't do much to Ticketmaster when Taylor Swift put tickets on sale for the Eras Tour. UK law can and will be different. The resale of football tickets has been successfully legislated against in the UK. That was for reasons of football violence rather than price gouging but it shows it can be done. |
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Post by blamerobots on Sept 5, 2024 18:24:47 GMT
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 |
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Post by Dave B on Sept 5, 2024 22:21:11 GMT
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. This happened for Jamie Lloyd's Romeo & Juliet. The pre-sale queue was paused and when it restarted, the ticket prices had increased. |
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