I was never much of an Oasis fan. I was 15 by the time their debut album Definitely Maybe came out, and was by then well on my way to becoming the pretentious cultural elitist and far-left poser you are now obliged to tolerate every Saturday in The Irish Times. Their brand of sensible, meat-and-two-veg Blair-rock was incompatible with my general teenage vibe, which was more efficiently served by apoplectic American hard-core and sneering British anarcho-punk. If a record didn’t sound like it was attempting to blast a hole straight through “the system”, and my own frontal lobe along with it, I was not at that point interested.
But my teenage self was wrong about Oasis. Despite hanging out with Tony and Cherie at 10 Downing Street, and despite Noel Gallagher’s more recent grumbling about the wokeists, they have, in the short time since announcing their upcoming reunion, gone further towards bringing about the downfall of capitalism than Gang of Four, Crass, or Fugazi ever managed. And for this, I must salute them as the comrades they have lately become.
They have achieved this, of course, not through shouting slogans over feedback-heavy guitars, but through a kind of accelerationist propaganda of the deed – by embracing the logic of capitalism so wholeheartedly that they have made its flaws luridly, even dangerously visible.
Last week, when tickets went on sale for their 2025 British and Irish reunion shows, fans were forced to wait in line on the Ticketmaster website for several hours, only to find, if they were lucky enough to get to the top of the queue, that the price for a ticket had ballooned in the meantime to several multiples of the advertised amount.
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This is a practice known as “dynamic pricing”, whereby an algorithm adjusts the cost of a product or service based on a real-time reflection of supply and demand.
When it comes to the experience of seeing Oasis play live, Oasis are – ironically, perhaps, given their reputation as not-particularly-innovative songwriters – quite literally the only show in town. They hold a monopoly position in the Oasis market, in other words: a market in which there is an almost limitless demand for a very limited commodity. The dynamic pricing through which many fans have had to pay upwards of €400 for a standing ticket advertised at €86.50 reflects the intensity of that demand.
When Ticketmaster uses this system, artists for whose performances they are selling tickets have to opt in. The public response to this has been one of outrage. People are contemptuous of a practice they see as price gouging – and rightly so. They don’t like it when hotels hike up prices for a room during situations of especially high demand – situations such as, and I hate to say it, a reformed Oasis playing in town. And they don’t like it when the cost of an Uber goes through the roof during rush hour. And they really don’t like it when a beloved rock band fleeces its fans.
It’s harder to get away with ripping off your customers when you’re not a faceless corporation, but a musical act centred around two authentically working class men of the people. (On Wednesday, after several days of opprobrium, Oasis issued a statement disavowing any responsibility for the dynamic pricing, claiming it was the decision of their management and promoters. This seems a pretty big decision for an employee to make without consulting its employer, but I admit I don’t know much about how the Gallagher brothers run their business affairs.)
[ Oasis, Ticketmaster and the great rock’n’roll swindleOpens in new window ]
[ Irish consumer watchdog opens investigation into Oasis ticket saleOpens in new window ]
One particularly interesting dimension of this outrage is the reaction among Irish politicians to consumers paying exorbitant fees for concert tickets. Fine Gael MEP Regina Doherty has called for a thorough investigation, saying she believes the pricing practice to be illegal. Aontú leader Peadar Tóibín has claimed it should be investigated by the Garda. Tánaiste Micheál Martin said in an interview last weekend that he thought the ticket prices were “quite shocking”, and that he hoped people would “reflect on what has transpired.”
He’s absolutely right, of course. And one way of reflecting on what has transpired, though perhaps not the way the Tánaiste had in mind, is to acknowledge the strangeness of the people running this country being shocked at dynamic pricing. It’s plainly a pretty despicable practice, but it’s just as plainly nothing new or remarkable. It is, in fact, a perfectly natural consequence of the system of free market capitalism functioning as it is intended to function.
If you or someone you know has attempted to buy or rent a home in Ireland in recent years, you certainly won’t need me, or even David McWilliams himself, to explain the supply-and-demand principle that underpins dynamic pricing
In response to a similar controversy over ticket pricing in the UK, Schellion Horn, a competition economist from the accounting and consultancy firm Grant Thornton, pointed out on BBC Radio that dynamic pricing was simply an efficient way of setting prices to reflect the relationship between supply and demand. “What we saw,” she said, “was a lot of people in the queues, a lot of people wanting those tickets. And perhaps there was an underpricing initially in that primary market. So I think there was a realisation that actually the tickets were underpriced.”
This is the basis on which much of our economy operates; don’t blame the Gallagher brothers, take it up with the free market. If you or someone you know has attempted to buy or rent a home in Ireland in recent years, you certainly won’t need me, or even David McWilliams himself, to explain the supply-and-demand principle that underpins dynamic pricing. What Micheál Martin calls “price gouging” in the context of an Oasis concert is not morally distinct from increasing rent on a property because the demand happens to be higher, and because the market will bear it.
In fact, the latter is very clearly even less defensible, and a good deal more socially damaging, because accommodation is a human necessity in a way that listening to Don’t Look Back in Anger in a field with 80,000 other people is not. If you’re going to call the cops over price gouging for concert tickets, as some of our politicians are suggesting, you’re going to have to call the cops on capitalism itself. And that, I’m guessing, is not what they mean to imply.