‘So, Sally can wait,” sang Oasis – and 15 years after the 90s supergroup’s breakup, people foolishly thought the wait was over. It’s a backhanded tribute to the Manchester band that most of its fans now bear the exact same constipated scowls as the Gallagher brothers on their ubiquitous new concert poster. The horrendous rigmarole required to buy tickets for their comeback has caused a mass outbreak of Oasis resting face – a deadpan glower of fathomless hostility that it took the brothers years of feuding to perfect.
It turns out prolonged house arrest by computer-wrought passive-aggression can accelerate those characterful frown lines no end. Online ticket booking is now so tortuous that the fact that some Oasis tickets reached NZ$12,000 apiece just hours after going on sale is not even its worst aspect.
The real horror is the economic cost of hundreds of thousands of people spending hours queuing for tickets and only after “dynamic” pricing (Uber-style surge pricing) kicks in are they allowed to buy. Paying the advertised price is a lottery few win. But those paying a scalped – onsold for profit – price risk promoters cancelling their tickets.
Politicians in Ireland are looking at regulating the ticketing giants after a particularly egregious Oasis booking outage, which even displaced the Middle East to lead news bulletins. (Sure, the Gallaghers’ mammy is from County Mayo, so she is.)
But the issues are slippery. Much of the trouble comes down to websites going haywire or crashing. Can you legislate to force a business to have an adequate IT system?
It seems inane, if your business periodically needs to be able to process hundreds of thousands of lucrative online orders over a very concentrated period, not to gear up accordingly. Mega-events such as Oasis and Taylor Swift tours aren’t scheduled every month, but when they are, they’re a bonanza. Ticket empires not having an adequate system for their peak earning times seems as derelict as flower growers not bothering to ramp up the rose supply for Valentine’s Day.
However, experience shows ticket buyers will, like Sally, wait and wait. Who cares if they look back in anger? Ticketmaster and the like still get their money.
Why go to the expense of having adequate online capacity when punters will persevere for days, even weeks, in their own time and at their own expense?
This is the cruelly unsung economic downside of these mega-tours. They measurably boost their host countries’ GDP. Swift’s shows can affect the local inflation rate and even register on the Richter scale.
But the queuing time also saps economies to a degree that, were economists to measure it, would provide a nasty counterpoint to the hoopla. The remedial Botox bill alone generated by Oasis’s return should trouble the International Monetary Fund.
Ticket sellers aren’t alone in culpability for needless dead time and lost productivity. Traffic jams and the laughably cynically named helplines also contribute to economic exsanguination.
Airlines are the worst, able to summarily detain people for hours in queued planes and transit lounges without explanation or recompense.
The ticket sellers’ is arguably the most heartless predation, as it exploits people’s devotion to an artist or sport. Through opportunistic surge pricing and scalping, customers shell out money that doesn’t go anywhere near the actual performers.
The bookies, too, are making an opportunistic buck out of the Gallaghers’ rapprochement, but at least they do it in a time-efficient way. They swiftly gave 4-1 odds on the notoriously belligerent Gallaghers still being willing to share a stage in a year’s time.
Oasis resting face is not pretty for fans, but just imagine the anguished pusses on the tour promoters’ insurance executives.
