“Was it worth the £40,000 you paid for a ticket?” Oasis frontman Liam Gallagher asked the Cardiff crowd on the opening night of the band’s reunion tour, which arrives at Dublin’s Croke Park this weekend.
His reference to the dynamic-pricing controversy that surrounded the sale of tickets for the tour – dubbed a “cheeky quip” by the Daily Mail – was, of course, slightly exaggerated.
But both the outlay for fans and the estimated pay-day for the Gallagher brothers from the Live ’25 tour are not exactly modest. Some Might Say it is definitely, not maybe, enough to shell out for a Champagne Supernova or two.
Let’s start with the consumer spending side. Anyone lucky enough to get a standing ticket at face value for the Croke Park gigs on Saturday or Sunday paid €176.75, including the Ticketmaster service charge. Prices for seats without obstructed views were higher again still.
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But, as almost everyone in the virtual queue for tickets soon discovered, prices went up at Supersonic speed. Within an hour of the start of the general sale, as high demand triggered system crashes and error messages, the only tickets left on sale cost more than €400.
And even a fan who escaped the ravages of dynamic pricing and spent €176.75 for that single standing ticket at the 82,000-capacity Croke Park is on track to face a much bigger total outlay on the concert.
Let’s assume they have aged out of their original 1990s T-shirts – or ditched them in the years when Liam and Noel Gallagher seemed unwilling to ever share a stage again – and are now in sudden need of some Oasis-branded gig attire. A trip to the band’s official merchandise pop-up store on St Stephen’s Green could set them back €40 for a T-shirt and €30 for a bucket hat.
How about pre-gig refreshments? Some Dublin hotels and restaurants have gone out of their way to say Hello to Oasis fans and make sure this opportunity to rake in some extra dough doesn’t Slide Away.
The adjacent Croke Park Hotel, owned by the Doyle Collection, is offering an all-you-can-eat (in 90 minutes) preconcert barbecue for €50 per person.
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Think bingeing on burgers would only lead to mid-concert regret? Another Dublin hospitality outlet overtly targeting Oasis fans is Molloy’s Pub on Talbot Street, which makes a virtue of the fact it has “no food, just top pints and fast service” – plus a DJ playing some Oasis deep cuts 20 minutes’ walk from Croke Park.
Tot up the cost of food and drink, transport and maybe some merch and it’s not hard to see why even those Oasis fans who managed to swerve the most expensive tickets could still end up spending more than €300, all in.
And what about those fans who need somewhere to stay overnight? Unless they have a friend with a spare sofa, they could be paying hundreds of euro more.
As soon as the Dublin dates were announced, prices for hotels in the city surged, with those looking to stay in three- and four-star accommodation asked to pay more than €400 for a room in many instances. A scan of available hotel properties on Booking.com shows some last-minute Saturday and Sunday night availability in the city for less than this price, but it is limited.
The Competition and Consumer Protection Commission, which last year opened an investigation into Ticketmaster’s handling of the Oasis ticket sale, has published a list of tips on how to keep hotel costs down headlined Hotel price spikes – should you just Roll with It?
Its advice for finding “relative value” when gigs are scheduled in Dublin includes considering a hotel outside the city centre in locations such as Tallaght, Swords, Citywest, Lucan or Clondalkin – options that, as it notes, involve higher transport costs and extra transit time.
City windfall
Calculating the economic benefits of hosting a gig or another big event is often more speculation than science. The key factor is always the number of visitors who have travelled specially for the event.
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For example, the noticeable volume of Taylor Swift fans who flew in from the US for her three-night stint at the Aviva Stadium last June meant the Eras tour gave a “boost” to the Dublin economy, though probably not by anything close to the €150 million figure – extrapolated from a flawed UK study – that circulated at the time.
More sensibly, when Garth Brooks played five Croke Park dates in September 2022, Dublin Chamber estimated that 120,000 of the 400,000-plus attendees travelled from outside the Republic to see the country star and suggested that this could be worth €35 million to the economy.
Will 30 per cent of the Oasis gig-goers this Saturday and Sunday also be from outside the State? That proportion could be on the high side, though, if it was the case, the two Oasis dates would be worth €14 million to the economy based on similar spending assumptions.
But if we say 20 per cent of the total two-night capacity of 164,000 travel to Dublin from outside the Republic and spend, for example, €200 each to share a two-person hotel room, €60 on food and drink and €30 on transport once they’re here – expenditure that flows back to the local economy – that would work out as a consumer spending injection of €9.5 million.
What we do know for sure is that the gigs will have attracted significant overseas interest, if only because tickets for the Dublin gigs went on sale a full hour before they did for UK cities and British fans didn’t want to miss out on any chance to see the band.
But while the Oasis gigs – and the Robbie Williams concert that follows on August 23rd – won’t exactly do the economy or the GAA’s stadium rental revenues any harm, they likely won’t be as lucrative as two other events at Croke Park this year.
The Aer Lingus College Football Classic between Kansas State and Iowa State later this month and September’s NFL game between Pittsburgh Steelers and Minnesota Vikings are both expected to lure substantial numbers of high-spending US fans for several days – a huge spending boon compared with mini-breaking gig tourists.
As for how much the Gallagher brothers will make, estimates vary, but one early report by academics at Birmingham City University estimated that the brothers would earn £50 million (€58 million) each from the 14 dates that were initially announced for Britain and Ireland.
That tally soon increased to 17 concerts, with dates subsequently announced for the US, Canada, Mexico, South Korea, Japan, Australia, Argentina, Chile and Brazil. This took the full tour up to 41 dates, swelling the total payout considerably.
The other band members on the tour will be earning much less. If Noel Gallagher, as the songwriter, opts to sell his rights to the band’s master recordings in the future, the uptick in streaming of Oasis songs triggered by the tour will enhance their value, meaning he should clean up more than his younger brother.
Whatever the actual bonanza, it’s clear there is money in nostalgia, in suspending brotherly hostilities and, most of all, in being a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star.
