Oasis, the band everyone likes to sing after too many pints at karaoke, is going on tour. Well, not exactly on tour—it’s more like 17 dates in the UK and Ireland in summer 2025. Still, considering the band broke up in 2009 and has just reunited, this is what most people are calling a big deal. If nothing else, the band’s leaders, the notoriously ever-feuding brothers Noel and Liam Gallagher, might throttle each other onstage at any given moment, and hardcore fans (aka the “madferits”) would really hate to miss that, even if it costs them north of $1,000.
As soon as the presale for the band’s upcoming gigs went online on Friday, tickets—which started at around $100 apiece—popped up on resale sites, with fans on X reporting that they were seeing prices in the $800 to $1,200 range, despite the fact that the band said it had put guardrails in place to prevent the cost of the tickets from getting out of hand. The BBC reported that some tickets were going for as much as $7,800.
To be a part of the presale, fans had to submit a ballot correctly answering questions about the band. Some who did so received a link to presale tickets; others didn’t and were “devastated,” anticipating a “Ticketmaster bloodbath” during the general on-sale, despite the fact that Oasis themselves had warned that tickets sold for more than face value would be “canceled by the promoters.”
On Saturday, things didn’t get much better. Fans trying to buy tickets through online ticketing sites found long waits, seemingly hard-to-swallow fees, error messages, bots and, reportedly, error messages claiming that fans themselves were the bots.
“Efforts like presale ballots can be helpful in curbing the immediate rush and chaos typically associated with ticket sales,” says Benjamin Fabre, cofounder of cyberfraud firm DataDome, “but they are not foolproof solutions against sophisticated bot attacks.”
Not all of the inflated ticket prices were the result of bots, however. After waiting hours in the queue, some fans reached the front only to find the price of tickets had more than doubled. This was due to dynamic pricing, a model that means the prices of tickets can change if there’s high demand. As tickets started to sell out on Saturday, fans urged bands and artists to push back against the use of dynamic pricing.
When WIRED asked Ticketmaster about fans’ dismay at prices inflating while they were in the queue, the company’s director of communications, Ally Norton, said that “all ticket prices, including Platinum, In Demand, and VIP, are set by the tour.” (“In Demand” is the name that Ticketmaster gives to tickets that are subject to dynamic pricing.)
Norton also backed up the warning given by the band, noting that buying tickets through unauthorized resale platforms “breaches the promoter’s terms and conditions and may result in those tickets being cancelled.” The company “strongly recommends” buying and selling tickets only through Ticketmaster or Twickets. “The tour has put this policy in place to cap ticket resale prices to combat price inflation and prevent ticket touting and bots,” Norton says.
The UK culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, on Monday confirmed that the British government will look into dynamic pricing as part of a planned review of how event tickets are sold, which is scheduled for the autumn. The review will investigate “issues around the transparency and use of dynamic pricing, including the technology around queuing systems which incentivize it,” Nandy told the BBC. (On Tuesday, the European Commission announced an investigation into dynamic pricing, according to The Guardian.)
MP Jamie Stone, the culture spokesperson for UK’s Liberal Democrats, said in a statement to The Guardian over the weekend that it was “scandalous to see our country’s biggest cultural moments turned into obscene cash cows by greedy promoters and ticketing websites.”
It seems all but inevitable this would happen. Whether it’s savvy scalpers trying to make a buck or bots—or, more likely, scalpers making bots—everything from Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour to the US Open seems to be getting hit with inflated resale prices almost instantly after tickets go on sale.
Bots, Fabre adds, can circumvent many guardrails, and “fraudsters can create thousands of fake accounts in advance of sales to become ‘Verified’ fans.” Bots impersonating common browsers like Google Chrome can slip past security checks and foil tools like captchas, he says.
Regardless of what happens next, the Oasis debacle could shed another light on what fans go through to get concert tickets. Despite the fact that the US Congress passed the Better Online Ticket Sales (BOTS) Act in 2016 and the European Union voted to ban bots in 2019, they’ve been far from eradicated.
If they’re not, people may start taking matters into their own hands.
“If I don’t get Oasis tickets, I’m going to spend the next 12 months tweeting both brothers a list of every bad thing they’ve said about each other to encourage another fall-out,” one posted on X late last week. “If I don’t get to see it, no one else gets to see it either.”
Updated 9-3-2024 1:45 pm BST: Ticketmaster’s responses to questions from WIRED were added.
Updated 9-3-2024 3:45 pm EDT: Includes new details about reports that the European Commission is investigating Ticketmaster.
