Seems like everyone working in music these days wants to be in artist services.
We’ve got distribution services, publishing admin services, neighboring rights services, royalty processing services, royalty collection services, marketing services, and financial services.
But do you know what might be the most valuable artist service offered by any corner of the music industry?
Being a pain sponge. Soaking up the hate and the brickbats and the accusations of greed and skulduggery so the artist doesn’t have to – and doing it without complaint.
Who’s the No.1 artist pain sponge in the world?
Ticketmaster, of course.
You’ve very likely heard of the bruising time Oasis fans had on Saturday (August 31) while trying to buy tickets for the band’s 14-date UK & Ireland 2025 tour.
The level of demand risked making Swiftonomics look like chump change.
A friend of mine was literally number 204,042 in the queue on Ticketmaster for one particular Wembley date; I saw people on socials showing screengrabs of them as far back as 400,000+.
Fourteen million people were reportedly expected to duke it out to purchase 1.4 million tickets.
Fourteen million. That’s not far off a quarter of the UK population.
You can see why all hell broke loose.
A few fans I know, myself included, sat in Ticketmaster’s faceless ‘queue’ for 6+ hours on Saturday, before finally getting through to a checkout and being told – due to Ticketmaster’s ‘Dynamic’ surge pricing – that the GBP £150 face value price we would have paid for standing ticket a few hours ago was no more. It had now been replaced by an ‘In Demand’ price tag more than twice the size (£355.20).
Inevitably, consumer fury spilled out onto social media and, indeed, actual media.
The UK’s left-wing Labour government responded via Lisa Nandy MP, who bemoaned Ticketmaster’s ‘Dynamic’ pricing efforts, which she said resulted in “vastly inflated prices excluding ordinary fans”. Nandy then floated the ghoul of government intervention, hinting at her keenness to enforce “tickets at fair prices”.
To Nandy, adult consumers are pea-brained imbeciles who, having stared at a bland Ticketmaster queue page for a few hours, become so cognitively overwhelmed they lose all concept of whether three hundred-odd quid is a price they’d ordinarily be willing to pay for a ticket.
I mean, maybe. Or maybe GBP £355 is just what an Oasis ticket is actually worth in 2024, so people pay it (safe in the knowledge they can always re-sell it for the same price down the line).
More on that in a second.
For now, here’s what matters: this is all obviously Terrible Ticketmaster’s fault, and just as TM’s getting a good shoeing from the Department of Justice in the US, now it’s also being pilloried from all sides in the UK.
Problem is, as anyone with a cursory understanding of the live business knows, Ticketmaster doesn’t set ticket prices or decide whether or not to switch on ‘Dynamic’ pricing. The artists and their representatives, and only the artists and their representatives, make that decision.
Ticketmaster’s job is merely to carry out the artist’s orders. And then to absorb the resultant pain, without complaint.
I’m sure none of the above is a surprise to you, reader; you’re doubtless a music industry maven.
But I’m hoping that perhaps one of the below three observations on the Oasis ticket melee – things I haven’t seen readily reported elsewhere – might at least arch an eyebrow:
Observation 1: This tour is going be a landmark moment in the war on ticket scalping
We all knew they were coming: the howl of complaints about Oasis tickets being resold for ludicrous prices on Viagogo, Stubhub et al.
Sure enough, a quick scan of Viagogo right now reveals that touts are trying to re-sell Oasis tix for as much as £4,000+.
Personally, I don’t think anyone’s fully prepared for what’s coming next.
Oasis warned in a statement on Friday (August 30): “Please note, tickets can ONLY be resold, at face value, via Ticketmaster and Twickets. Tickets sold in breach of the terms and conditions will be cancelled by the promoters.”
Could we really see a situation in which thousands of fans who’ve purchased resale Oasis tickets on Viagogo (for thousands of pounds each) are suddenly told by Ticketmaster that their tickets have been invalidated?
“Tickets can ONLY be resold, at face value, via Ticketmaster and Twickets. Tickets sold in breach of the terms and conditions will be cancelled by the promoters.”
Oasis Statement, August 31
Would Oasis really put themselves through the punishing media headlines that follow this scenario?
Yes.
It’s going to happen – and I know first-hand how.
Witness the impressively heartless email below sent to me after Ticketmaster canceled two resale tickets I purchased to see (the ridiculously good) Stephen Wilson Jr. in New York earlier this year.
These were legit tickets I bought through a legit site – AEG’s AXS – from a seller who’d originally purchased them on Ticketmaster.
Ticketmaster DGAF.
A couple of weeks after I’d obtained my electronic tickets and moved them into the Ticketmaster app as instructed, Ticketmaster briskly voided them – noting that the woman who’d sold them to me had somehow breached the firm’s T&Cs.
TM apologized for “any inconvenience caused,” but not for the USD $160 that my reseller pocketed… and that Ticketmaster declined to refund.
I repeat: Ticketmaster DGAF.
I’m expecting Ticketmaster’s (brilliantly Orwellian) ‘Fan Support’ team to send similarly brusque “you’re dumped” emails to hordes of Oasis resellers (and re-buyers) in the months ahead.
This will result in a groundswell of moaning from scalpers who bought Oasis Live ’25 tickets with the sole intention of reselling them for profit.
Good. It’s going to be brutal. But for those of us who hate scalpers – especially those scalpers using bots to buy up institutional volumes of tickets – it’s also going to be VERY funny.
Still don’t believe me that this is on the way?
Noel Gallagher’s long-time managers, Marcus Russell and Alec McKinlay, like many fellow artist reps, also despise professional scalpers.
And here’s the thing: in 2016, both Russell and McKinlay personally invested in Twickets, a site expressly created so that fans could resell tickets at face value (and no more).
Twickets is now, alongside Ticketmaster, the only official resale destination for Oasis Live ’25 tickets. No profiting allowed.
The best news for Oasis fans?
Once Oasis’ anti-scalping crusade kicks into high gear, I’d suggest as much as tens of thousands of Oasis tix could be reissued (by Ticketmaster) or resold (by frustrated scalpers)… for their original primary price.
Observation 2: Oasis and their managers probably thought the ‘Dynamic’ pricing setup was generous
Imagine you just created the world’s most delicious chocolate bar, full of toffee and sprinkles and biscuit and son-sheeeiiine.
You have 1.4 million chocolate bars. Some 14 million people want the chocolate bars. Factoring in basic principles of supply and demand, you know you could comfortably charge 2-3X what Mars or Snickers charge for their bars.
But you don’t. You want the working man to get a taste; you’re not mad keen on the thought of your entire audience of chocolate chewers being hedge fund managers in boat shoes. The people deserve some son-sheeeiiine.
So here’s what you do: You initially sell two-thirds of your bars at a price roughly on par with other confectionary in the market. But you then sell the remaining third of the bars at a higher price point – these ones are for the boat shoe brigade.
I have no insight from Team Oasis here, but I’m gonna go ahead and guess this is a roughly accurate allegory for recent conversations between the likes of Ignition (Marcus Russell and Alec McKinlay – repping Noel) and UROK (Sam Eldridge, Roy Eldridge, Debbie Gwyther – repping Liam).
It was possibly quite a shock for Team Oasis, then, to realize on Saturday night that… *does maths on fingers*… around 13 million fans were left fighting for a remaining stash of ~450,000 tickets (i.e. 1/3rd of the allocation)… only to then be told the price had more than doubled.
That was never going to result in happy bunnies everywhere.
Ticketmaster’s biggest mistake in the Oasis on-sale? Not informing queuing fans earlier that the ticket price had surged.
Millions of Oasis-heads waited in that Ticketmaster queue for hours before being ‘rewarded’ with a 100%+ rise in the amount they were expected to pay.
I don’t care how mellow you are; that’s rage-inducing stuff.
People defending Ticketmaster’s ‘Dynamic’ pricing often point out it works just the same as Uber’s surge pricing – when demand is high, you should expect to pay more.
Fair enough. But I don’t wait eight hours for an Uber only for the driver to double the price when I get in the car.
That might result in some choice language.
Observation 3: This might all be about music rights (and money) after all
We’ve reached the fun bit!
What do we reckon Oasis and their tour promoters (including SJM and Live Nation) will gross from this 14-date tour?
Let’s say my guess – of 66% of tickets being standard price (£70-£150) and 33% carrying the surge price (£355) – is accurate.
In that case, just from tickets for Oasis’ 14 UK & Ireland dates in 2025, you’d be looking at a gross of around GBP £270 million. In USD, that’s almost bang on $350 million.
That doesn’t include additional fees, merch, VIP tiers, food and drink etc., which could push it up towards USD $500 million.
(Crucially, it also doesn’t take into account Oasis’ North America 2025 tour, with whisperers suggesting there’ll be multiple shows across the US, Canada, and Mexico next summer.)
Regardless, it’s a reasonable guess that the brothers Gallagher will each have secured a USD $80+ million guarantee (i.e. ‘advance’) for this tour, taking into account crew and production costs.
That’s big money. But it might not be the largest check Noel Gallagher receives over the next 12 months.
Back in summer 2021, Gallagher, the 100% writer of most of Oasis songs (and nearly all their hits), started talking about his desire to sell his Oasis songwriting catalog for a princely sum.
“All my songs come back to me in 2025,” he revealed in an interview with his friend, Matt Morgan. Gallagher then half-joked about “hedge fund guys” paying him £200 million for the song portfolio.
He added: “What do you do? Leave it to your kids? They don’t value music.
“Or do you take the £200 million and buy the superyacht and the Learjet and go, ‘F***ing have it, come on!'”
“It’s not a joke.”
Noel Gallagher on plans to sell his publishing catalog and buy a superyacht, 2021
A few months later, Morgan once again pressed Gallagher on the fact that his Oasis song publishing rights were reverting to him in 2025 – and whether or not he was serious about the superyacht.
“Was that a joke?” asked Morgan.
“No,” said Gallagher, noting he planned to call his superyacht “MegaMega White Thing” in tribute Underworld’s peerless floor-filler, Born Slippy.
Poker-faced, Gallagher added: “It’s not a joke. I love being at sea… there’s nothing better than horsing around on a boat.”
There have been a million and one mooted reasons why the sub-zero Gallagher Brothers’ relationship has thawed in time for next year’s landmark Oasis Live ’25 tour.
Some say it was a natural rekindling of brotherly respect; others suggest their mum, Peggy, had a hand in the reconciliation.
Harder hearts note that Noel recently finalized a divorce from ex-wife Sarah MacDonald (a spouse his brother was none too fond of) and agreed to pay her a reported GBP £20 million.
But perhaps there’s another factor. The elder Gallagher brother may have been watching Taylor Swift’s blockbuster Eras tour – and how the enormity of her live ambitions has directly amplified the streaming popularity, and profitability, of her hits.
And guess what? As you read this – following all the buzz about the weekend’s live concert on-sale – Oasis have two tracks inside Spotify‘s UK daily Top 10.
They’re also on course to have a No.1 UK album on Friday with 1994’s Definitely Maybe.
Back in the day, famous artists toured to help promote their latest record. More recently, they’ve released new records to help promote their tours.
If you’re Noel Gallagher? You might tour to maximize the price of your most valuable asset – before liquidating it and sailing off into the sunset… on a MegaMega White Thing.Music Business Worldwide
