This weekend, Oasis tickets go on sale for the band’s two nights at Slane Castle in September 2027. Plenty of people will groan at the prospect of another Oasis tour. I welcome the excuse to talk about ticket pricing again!
For years my go-to interview question for graduates was: how would you set ticket prices for a Bruce Springsteen concert? Over time, fewer and fewer graduates knew who Bruce Springsteen was. But, the underlying economics did not change: (1) how do you estimate demand, and (2) how, and why, would you price discriminate?
Dynamic pricing brought those two questions together. That is, as expected demand changes in real time, and hence available supply remaining changes, prices can adjust in real time. Less work for economists, I hear you wail? As it turns out, no. Dynamic pricing is what drove the initial outrage in August 2024, but it is not what the CCPC’s case is about.
The CCPC’s case is a consumer protection case under the Consumer Protection Act 2007. It has two limbs.
- “Platinum” tickets were sold that carried no additional benefit or experience over standard tickets.
- Material information about ticket prices was provided in a manner that was unclear, unintelligible, ambiguous or untimely.
What makes a practice misleading?
Key to both limbs is the same test: a practice is misleading only where it “would be likely to cause the average consumer to make a transactional decision that the average consumer would not otherwise make”. Put plainly, absent the practice, would the average consumer have bought the ticket anyway?
A few economic questions the case will have to engage with.
- Premium tickets were already a feature of the Irish live music market before the Oasis sale. Fans at earlier events would have understood that the only “premium” thing about a premium ticket was that it was available, with availability itself being a benefit when the alternative is no ticket at all. The question then is whether the “average Oasis fan” differs from those fans? This may be plausible if, for many, this was their first concert since Féile 1995.
- Did premium tickets really carry no additional benefit? Much as with a last-minute train ticket or a final-release festival ticket, being available at the moment of purchase may be a material benefit relative to the sold-out alternative. The key question is how consumers were funneled towards the different options: standard, premium and the rest.
- If the average consumer would not have bought the ticket without the allegedly misleading practices, you would expect those consumers to resell their tickets once the full picture emerged. Plenty of fans resell in any event, because circumstances change and other plans intervene. What would be informative is whether the share of Oasis tickets resold differed materially from comparable events. Any discounts, or lack of, provided on the resold tickets may also be revealing.
- Resale also goes to the gravity of any infringement, in terms of any potential penalty. A consumer who decided they no longer wanted the ticket could sell it, so the loss is the discount to face value on resale, if any, plus the cost of holding the ticket in the meantime.
The case was adjourned to 5 October, with disclosure ordered, and Ticketmaster has said it will contest the matter fully. It will be some time before anything conclusive comes out of it.
But is there anything to be learned already, ahead of this weekend’s sale?
Ticketmaster has already changed its pricing disclosure. Slane tickets are listed at fixed prices from €181.25 to €501.25 including fees.
What is left is what economists call second degree price discrimination: consumers pay different prices for different versions of the product and self-select into a tier, whether that is general admission, standing near the front, reserved seating or better toilettes. Discrimination of this kind tends to attract less objection as the consumer chooses the tier and can see a difference in quality beyond availability.
What does that mean for the queues? I expect less outrage this time, but that has less to do with price (which remains high) than with process. Registration for tickets closed on 17 September and buyers have been given individual access windows across 25 to 27 September. This looks like an effort to avoid a repeat of the criticism of the purchase process last time around.
The pricing question has not gone away entirely. It has moved from the checkout page to the tier menu. Some might say that is progress