Roll With It
“You’ve gotta roll with it, you gotta take your time, you gotta say what you say, don’t let anybody get in your way, ’cause it’s all too much for me to take. Don’t ever stand aside, don’t ever be denied…” — Noel Gallagher
In summer 1996, Oasis were due to play at Knebworth House, a stately home 25 miles north of London, and I was desperate to get tickets. The band had already released two critically acclaimed albums and was riding high in popularity. Capacity was 125,000 per night over two nights but demand far exceeded that. In total, 2.5 million people applied for tickets, more than 4% of the UK population, the highest ever demand for a concert in the country. “Right here, right now, this is history,” Noel would tell the crowd.
I was lucky. While others queued for tickets or feverishly redialled on landlines, I had a new Motorola mr20 mobile phone whose handy autodial feature meant that I could sit back and wait for an operator to pick up and take my order. I bought eight tickets – the maximum allowed – for £22.50 each.
Sadly, I didn’t have seven friends. Four of us went and I planned on selling the spares outside the venue. With demand outstripping supply ten to one, I figured I could collect a tidy profit. But I overestimated my distribution skills: Finding buyers among the hordes of fans sweeping in was no easy task. I needed a middleman. Begrudgingly, I sold the tickets to a tout at a discount to face value, leaving him to pick up the spread. I headed into the park, humming Roll With It to myself.
Nearly 30 years later, ticketing has all changed. Last week, tickets went on sale for an Oasis comeback tour next summer. After registering with Ticketmaster and passing an anti-bot test, fans could join an online queue. But many found themselves thrown off the site or mislabelled as bots. To their fury, prices even shot up while they waited, the result of Ticketmaster’s dynamic pricing model. Having waited in line for several hours to buy tickets at £148, thousands were faced with a choice to cough up £355 or not bother and write off the time they’d spent waiting.
American concertgoers will be used to this. Ticketmaster is the dominant ticket supplier in the US, accounting for over 80% of the total face value associated with all concert tickets sold at major venues. The company introduced dynamic pricing – what it calls “platinum” – some years ago, where it is now “probably about in the fifth inning,” according to group CEO Michael Rapino. Outside the US, though, “we’re in the first inning… we’re just rolling this out around the world.”
It’s fair to say the practice hasn’t gone down well in Oasis’s part of the world. The Prime Minister even got involved: “This isn’t just an Oasis problem, this is a problem for tickets for all sorts of events … We’ll grip this, and make sure that tickets are available at a price that people can actually afford.” His culture minister promised to include dynamic pricing in a forthcoming consultation on ticket reselling and the Competition and Markets Authority launched an investigation.
For Ticketmaster, the backlash is nothing new. Months before Oasis released their debut album in 1994, grunge band Pearl Jam filed a complaint against Ticketmaster’s practices. Foreshadowing Keir Starmer, President Bill Clinton weighed in: “The White House is impressed by Pearl Jam’s commitment to its fans,” said an advisor. “We think the goal of making concert ticket prices affordable is a laudable one.”
A more recent antitrust case brought by the US Department of Justice in May takes as a given the public’s frustration with concert ticket pricing and rails against the “Ticketmaster Tax that ultimately raise[s] the price fans pay.”
The thing is, though, fans aren’t Ticketmaster’s primary customers – venues and promoters are, and part of the company’s business model is to soak up rancor on their behalf. Rapino made this plain on a call with investors early last year (emphasis added):
“Our Ticketmaster job is to service the venue and our concert job is to service the artist. And we’ve done a fabulous job building those businesses and having very, very happy customers. And part of that proposition historically has been to take a bit of the heat at the front end.”
It’s an effective model. The live music industry involves artists, promoters, venues and ticketers, all of whom want to get paid. Ticketmaster can make that happen while shielding others from the fallout in a market where, for the most bankable gigs, there’s never enough inventory. Since my outing to Knebworth, average concert tickets prices in the US are up 390% and for the hottest shows globally – like Oasis – they are up more. There’s a famous chart of the cumulative inflation of goods and services from the late 90s to the present day. Concert tickets aren’t on it, but if they were, they’d be at the top.
To explore the economics of concert ticketing and the business model of Ticketmaster (including how it succeeded as a “bank in disguise”) read on.