The cynical manipulation of ‘dynamic pricing’ for Oasis tickets

Given my unequivocal feelings about the Oasis reunion, I was, apparently, one of the few people in Britain who was not attempting to obtain tickets yesterday for one of their stadium gigs next year. As is usually the case these days when a much-hyped act returns for a series of mega-concerts, the wall-to-wall publicity that the concerts had attracted meant that it seemed almost obligatory for the average punter to extract their credit card, gulp, breathe a silent prayer and at least try and secure their place in Manchester, London, Dublin or any of the other venues that the Gallaghers will be gracing next year.

Had they done so, they would have experienced a remarkable day of frustration and cynical manipulation.

Despite around a million tickets being on sale, the major ticket websites – Ticketmaster, Gigs and Tours and See Tickets – all crashed under a level of demand that could easily have been anticipated but the operators seemed unable to cope with, not least because of an onslaught of opportunistic ticket-scalping bots.