British rock band Oasis reuniting wasn’t on many people’s 2024 bingo cards, but it quickly became one of the biggest selling shows around. More than 50,000 tickets sold for the U.K. reunion tour will now be canceled, because of resellers. These invalidated tickets will be made available (again) through the official seller, Ticketmaster, at face value. Which is still expensive with all the fees, but way chaper than buying on secondary platforms.
Oasis Ticket Cancellations
Like most huge concerts demand for Oasis tickets far outweighs the supply. To combat this fans were told they could only buy tickets through Ticketmaster or resale partner, Twickets. In an effort to prevent resellers from buying up a bunch and posting them elsewhere for wildly inflated prices.
Roughly 1.4 million tickets were available but 10 million fans from 158 countries were attempting to buy them. And wouldn’t you know, the secondary market soon became flooded with them at outrageous prices. Approximately 4% of the total ticket available (over 50,000) ended up in these unauthorized markets.
In the next few days the promoter will cancel these ill-gotten tickets. Fans that believe they have had their tickets canceled in error will be able to speak to an agent to open an investigation.
“These terms and conditions were successfully put in place to take action against secondary ticketing companies reselling tickets for huge profit,” said a company spokesperson. “Only four percent of tickets have ended up on resale sites. Some major tours can see up to 20 percent of tickets appearing via the major unauthorised secondary platforms.”
“All parties involved with the tour continue to urge fans not to purchase tickets from unauthorised websites as some of these may be fraudulent and others subject to cancellation,” they added.
An Imperfect Solution
But this threat doesn’t seem to be stopping anyone. A rep for the U.K. secondary ticket company Viagogo has already confirmed they will continue to sell Oasis tickets.
“We will continue to sell them in the way the regulator says we can,” they told the BBC. “We are serving a clear consumer need, we will continue doing it on that basis.”
Even though many customers that want tickets could acquire them at more reasonable prices if they weren’t all being bought up by resellers. Selling the solution to a problem that you helped create is a perplexingly ballsy move. As universailly hated as Ticketmaster is, resellers just compound the issue and jack up prices even more.
Anyway, here’s Wonderwall:
