The die is cast for those who will be able to attend the Oasis reunion tour next year in the British Isles. This Saturday the raffle to distribute tickets for the 17 concerts that the Gallaghers will give in the coming months of July and August in Ireland and the United Kingdom ended. In total, 1.4 million tickets have been sold with prices ranging from 89 to 600 euros, which, with a calculator in hand, is a good amount for Liam, 51, and Noel, 57, to face retirement without worrying about the fact that Brexit has left the Englishmen without social security in Benalmádena. According to calculations by the AFP agency, the tour could bring in more than 470 million euros, and the brothers could take home around 60 million euros each.
British bookmakers were putting the fans’ chances of getting the coveted ticket to the concerts at 14/1, meaning that more than 14 million people were going to take part in this post-modern squid game. Said and done, at 8am, as soon as the Ticketmaster Ireland website put tickets on sale for the band’s two concerts in Dublin, which sold out in two hours, a waiting list of more than 550,000 people was formed, collapsing the system and involuntarily expelling numerous hopefuls when they were already in the queue.
An hour later, tickets for the other 15 concerts went on sale, with a similarly large crowd that forced fans to wait for hours, while some joked that the brothers might argue again while waiting for their turn. This newspaper tried to buy tickets for the Cardiff concert and, after waiting seven hours and without further explanation, was redirected to the front of the queue when the website itself reported that there were very few tickets left.
As fans queued up to buy tickets, the name of British band Blossoms began to circulate as the band that will support Oasis on this tour. The indie-rock band from Stockport, a town located in what is known as Greater Manchester, will release their fifth album this coming September, Garyand has already supported Noel Gallagher and his High Flying Birds at their concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London.
The frenzy for Oasis tickets had already been going on throughout the week, after the band organised a raffle which offered the winners access to a pre-sale of tickets on Friday afternoon. To enter the competition, all you had to do was sign up on the band’s website and guess who the band’s first drummer was, for which there were three options: Alan White, Chris Sharrock and Tony McCarroll, the latter being the correct answer.
As expected, resale sites also responded to the call, and at the end of the contest tickets for the Wembley concerts could be found on the Stubhub.com website for prices exceeding 6,000 euros. This caused the band’s official accounts to issue a warning, reminding that the only legal resale was through Ticketmaster and only for the same price of the ticket plus processing fees. However, this Saturday websites such as Viagogo were selling tickets for concerts such as the one in Cardiff on July 4th – the opening act of the tour – for prices between 845 and 7,016 euros. At the same time, many fans complained that when the time came to buy the ticket they found that Ticketmaster itself had applied the dynamic pricing mechanism to raise the price under the “On demand” category.
The same crazy inflation has been seen in hotel prices in the areas where the concerts will be held, where the Daily Mail has recorded increases of 30% with spikes as exaggerated as the 1,388 pounds asked for a room at the Townhouse Hotel in Manchester for July 11 – the first concert in the city – when two weeks later the same room is offered for 119 pounds. Greed in the country that Margaret Thatcher ruled has reached the point that, according to the BBC, some hotels have cancelled reservations made before the dates of the concerts were known and then resold the same rooms for three times the price offered. After all, if the Gallaghers have turned reconciliation into a business, why not do the same with hospitality?
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