It was the battle they had unknowingly been training for all their lives when Oasis fans in the UK and Ireland entered the Ticketmaster queue for the band's 2025 reunion shows on Saturday (August 31), facing Taylor Swift Eras Tour-level crashes, bots and dynamic pricing — the ticketing giant's patented model that adjusts ticket prices based on consumer demand.
And it's not much of a story, morning glory, that the demand was huge: over a million people reportedly queued to buy tickets to the concerts at London's Wembley Stadium alone.
UPDATE (9/4, 1:00 p.m. ET): Oasis have announced two additional shows at Wembley with a "invitation-only ballot sale strategy" for September 27 and 28 "as a small step toward making amends for the situation," the Independent reports.
"Applications to join the ballot will be opened first to the many fans who were unsuccessful in the initial on sale with Ticketmaster," the statement from the band's team explained, further promising that the sale would be "far smoother for fans by reducing the stress and time it takes to obtain" the highly coveted reunion tour tickets.
"As expected Oasis is incredibly popular," Ticketmaster said in a statement. "We're processing orders as quickly as possible so please keep your place in line. Fans are advised to hold their place in line, make sure they're only using one tab, clear cookies, and ensure they aren't using any VPN software on their device."
"Tickets for Oasis are still available, but inventory is now limited and not all ticket prices are available," the platform added (although they have since sold out), and "In Demand Standing" tickets were subsequently made available for more than twice the price of general admission presale tickets.
"Please note, Oasis Live '25 tickets can only be resold at face value via @TicketmasterUK and @Twickets! Tickets appearing on other secondary ticketing sites are either counterfeit or will be cancelled by the promoters," Oasis themselves tweeted, with Rolling Stone reporting that fans added a Community Note to the post, writing, "Oasis published ticket prices which put Standing tickets in most of their venues at ~£150. Thats [sic] face value. Oasis have allowed for Ticketmaster to sell via dynamic pricing which has those exact same £150 face value tickets listed for £350+."
As per The Guardian, the ticketing platform has said that the final decision on the pricing strategy rested with the band and their management, who have yet to comment. Yesterday (September 2), the Advertising Standards Authority said it had received more than 450 complaints from Oasis fans about "misleading claims about availability and pricing."
While this is certainly not the first we've heard of Ticketmaster's dynamic pricing model here in North America, it has historically been relatively uncommon in the UK and Ireland. Some fans have claimed that, after queuing all day, they only had minutes to decide whether to pay more than double for Standing Tickets or miss out on a reunion nobody really thought would ever happen.
Consumer law experts told The Guardian that, while not illegal, the way Ticketmaster applied its dynamic pricing in this instance may have breached consumer regulations if it had not been made clear to fans that the price of basic tickets were subject to change.
"It is a breach of the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations (2008) if a trader misleads consumers regarding the price of goods and services, if that causes the average consumer to take a different 'transactional decision,'" Sylvia Rook, lead officer for fair trading at the Chartered Trading Standards Institute (CTSI), told the publication. "In this case many consumers would not have joined the queue had they known that the price would have increased by the time they were able to purchase, and many fans could not afford the increased price."
UK Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy has pledged to look into the matter. The government set to hold a consultation on resale prices this autumn, and dynamic pricing will now be included in the scope of it, the BBC reports. Nandy told the outlet that she plans to end "rip-off resales" and make sure tickets are sold "at fair prices," adding that it was "depressing to see vastly inflated prices excluding ordinary fans."
People online have pointed to the stand the Cure took against exorbitant ticket costs with their 2023 tour, opting out of dynamic pricing and collaborating with Ticketmaster — which lost about a million dollars to reimburse fans for added fees after Robert Smith's outcry — and strongly advocating to keep last year's North American run "affordable for all fans."
Meanwhile, after having already promised that their reunion tour would "hit other continents outside of Europe later next year," Oasis are definitely maybe further teasing US concerts to come: on their Instagram Story, the band posted a photo of a Times Square billboard that reads, "If we need to put up a billboard to get these guys to come to the States, here it is," with a side-eye emoji.
