The band “Oasis” The Rock Band, a band that loves to sing along after too many drinks at karaoke, are going on tour. Well, not exactly a tour, more like a 17-date tour of the UK and Ireland in the summer of 2025. But since the band only recently reformed after splitting in 2009, this is what most would call a major event. At the very least, the band’s notoriously feuding brothers, Noel and Liam Gallagher, might strangle each other onstage at any moment, and hardcore fans (aka “Mad Felitz”) will definitely not want to miss it, even if they have to shell out $1,000 or more.
As soon as presales for the band’s upcoming shows began online on Friday, tickets started popping up on resale sites, starting at around $100 apiece. X fans have reported seeing prices ranging from $800 to $1,200, despite the band saying they have guardrails in place to prevent ticket prices from getting out of hand. The BBC reported that some tickets are going for as much as $7,800.
To take part in the pre-sale, fans had to submit a ballot that correctly answered a question about the band, and while some who responded received a link to pre-sale tickets, those who did not were “disappointed” and predicted a “Ticketmaster disaster” during the general sale, despite Oasis themselves warning that any tickets sold above list price would “be cancelled by the promoters”.
Things weren’t much better on Saturday, as fans trying to buy tickets through online ticketing sites were met with long wait times, exorbitant prices, error messages, bots and, reportedly, error messages from fans who claimed to be bots themselves.
“Initiatives like early voting may help limit the immediate congestion and chaos that typically accompanies ticket sales,” said Benjamin Fabre, co-founder of cyber fraud prevention firm Datadome, “but they’re not a perfect solution to sophisticated bot attacks.”
But not all of the ticket price hikes are the result of bots. Some fans who waited hours in line to get to the front of the line found that their tickets had more than doubled in price. This was the result of dynamic pricing, a model in which tickets change price when demand is high. As tickets began to sell out on Saturday, fans called on bands and artists to speak out against using dynamic pricing. (Ticketmaster did not respond to an email sent over the weekend seeking comment on the matter.)
UK Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy confirmed on Monday that the UK government will investigate dynamic pricing as part of a review of how event tickets are sold, due in the autumn. The review will look into “issues around the transparency and use of dynamic pricing, and the technology around queuing systems that encourage it,” Nandy told the BBC. “It is shameful to see our country’s biggest cultural moment being turned into an immoral cash cow by greedy promoters and ticket selling websites,” Jamie Stone, UK Liberal Democrat culture spokesman, said in a statement to the Guardian over the weekend.
