Ignoring football tournaments, Culture Minister Lisa Nandy’s first salvo into the world of entertainment has been triggered by the “scandal” over dynamic or surge pricing on the sale of Oasis tickets.
Dynamic pricing, which everyone will recognise from attempts to book airline or rail tickets, is intended to work in both directions. When demand is low, ticket prices reduce with the obvious corollary applying in situations such as Oasis, where prospective audience members seem alarmingly keen to be fleeced.
Fans were obviously over the moon on discovering that the Gallagher brothers have buried the hatchets. Many were queueing virtually for hours to purchase tickets at what sounded like very high prices. However, a significant proportion got a shock on discovering that the advertised prices were merely a guide and, as demand ramped up, so did the cost of tickets.
These doubled and more to the point where anyone sane would have waited for X rates, a future tour or decided that paying 20 quid to hear an Oasis tribute band in the local pub represented much better value.
The shock and anger may be somewhat fabricated, since the idea of flexible pricing, albeit without the flashy “dynamic” branding has been around for as long as theatre. It is likely that everyone reading this column has, at some point, been the beneficiary of such policies, snapping up a show ticket at the very last minute from the box office for almost nothing or finding themselves promoted from the balcony to the stalls on a quiet day, effectively saving a tidy sum in the process.
What has changed in recent years is the advent of telephone and then online booking services, all of which charge a very hefty premium. In bygone days, the only way to get a theatre ticket was to visit the venue. Nobody had heard of dynamic pricing or booking fees, you just picked your seat and paid the published price.
For very popular entertainments, there might have been a long queue and possibly even the unsavoury presence of ticket touts attempting to rip off willing victims. That was certainly the case when, as Charles Spencer mortally proclaims, Nicole Kidman was delivering “pure theatrical Viagra” in The Blue Room on a nightly basis.
One of the issues in the Oasis saga is that agencies, including the oft-quoted Ticketmaster, do not charge a flat fee for their service. One wonders why. If you answer the telephone, allocate a ticket to an individual and send them a link or an envelope, the cost should not differ whether the ticket costs £5 or £500.
For obvious reasons, agencies disagree, charging a fixed percentage rather than a flat fee and therefore having a massive financial incentive to push prices up as far as possible. In this case, some of the amounts that they were making could be regarded as extortionate, hence Lisa Nandy’s ire.
Those selling tickets officially put up something of a defence, albeit weak, identifying secondary sellers who buy tickets and instantly market them with an incredible mark-up. Arguably, this is providing a service, but the sooner the government restricts or outlaws such activities the better.
Readers are urged to follow this story, as it is likely to affect their pockets for years to come. If Lisa Nandy takes strong enough action, there could be restrictions on profiteering, whether by secondary sellers or authorised ticket agencies, as well as limits on commissions and other selling fees.
Alternatively, we may just get a lot of hot air and no action until Taylor Swift or Oasis launch their 2025 tours and we watch exactly the same story play out once again.