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Once upon a time... music fans used to queue for their tickets. Was it a fairer system? Gareth Chaney/Photocall Ireland!/RollingNews.ie
SeriesNobody Needs This
Have concert ticket sales completely lost the run of themselves?
A series where Emer McLysaght saves us from chasing every trend and instead points us to things worthy of our time (and money).
In Nobody Needs This, a series for The Journal, Emer McLysaght focuses her eagle eye on the trends, products and notions we can do without. It’s not all giving out, however. She’ll also be keeping up with what’s catching her attention, keeping people interested and, quite frankly, driving her mad.
IN 1997, OASIS played a three-night residency at Dublin’s Point Depot. These were the infamous shows where Liam Gallagher pulled out after the first gig, blaming a throat infection, and his brother Noel stepped in and took over full frontman duties. I was 16 years old and me and my pals left school early that day, so my Dad could drive us up to Dublin to get into the queue and guarantee ourselves a spot at the front of the crowd.
There were hastily printed notices stuck to the walls outside The Point advising us that Liam wouldn’t be performing. It had been all over the radio that day. Gerry Ryan was in his element, and we were singing our hearts out in the queue.
To be honest, sometimes the queueing was almost as enjoyable as the gigs themselves. To secure tickets for that Oasis show, we would have stayed up all night outside Top Twenty music shop in Naas waiting for them to go on sale on a Saturday morning; tickets used to always go on sale on a Saturday morning.
At 16, we were already almost too old for the local over-18 nightclub, but the ticket plan would involve going to the Ambassador Hotel in Kill for a few hours dancing and then back into Naas at around 2 am to begin the queueing for tickets. Each Ticketmaster agent around the country would have a set allocation, and rumours about how many tickets were available inside Top Twenty and how that corresponded to your place in the line would have the nerves on edge.
From the Megastore to HMV
Physical queueing for tickets has almost completely been replaced by online systems. The most recent in-person frenzied ticket sales in my memory were for the doomed 2014 Garth Brooks Croke Park shows (don’t mention the war). In just 90 minutes, 400,000 tickets were sold, many to those who had camped for up to 48 hours.
These days, fans are camping out at laptops and in virtual waiting rooms in the great Ticketmaster battles and artists and promoters are devising increasingly complicated presale schemes which, quite frankly, have lost the run of themselves.
Ticket presales used to be somewhat exclusive. They might reward loyalty to an artist; for instance, if you had attended two of their previous tours or had pre-ordered a physical copy of their album, you would be granted a code for access to a presale. These sales didn’t guarantee fans tickets, but it gave them a head start before a general sale.
In the past few years, presales have ramped up to a point where general sales seem redundant. Credit card and mobile phone partnerships can grant access to presale codes; signing up to a venue, artist or promoter’s mailing list might do it; being a ‘VIP’ member of something or another could get you in. It’s at the point now where so many people are accessing presales that by the time the ‘general’ comes along, most of the seats or tickets have already been sold.
Take the presale for the Harry Styles concerts next Summer in Croke Park. To qualify for the presale all you had to do was register via promoter MCD by 4 pm the day before. So, in theory, enough people could have signed up for the presale to sell out all two shows. In fairness to Harry and his teams, the transparency around ticket types and prices was very clear before any sale took place, which is to be commended in a concert culture where such things had become very murky and predatory.
However, large presales like this do little to serve the fans, and everything to benefit the moneymakers who get to harvest fan data, gauge demand, increase product sign-ups and subscriptions and charge added fees for exclusive experiences now that the exclusivity is essentially gone out of most presales. Not only that, but multi-tiered presales with various codes and dates are confusing for fans, especially those who are not completely online literate.
Then there are the Ticketmaster queues and waiting rooms. I logged on for the Harry Styles presale on Monday morning. The presale was due to start at 9 am, but I know from experience that a virtual ‘waiting room’ will often open at some point before the sale for large events. I was at my computer from 8 am, and at 8.30 was admitted to the waiting room. When the presale began at 9 am I was informed I was around 8,000th in the queue, which would have been catastrophic had I been on the street outside Top Twenty, but actually isn’t bad for a venue like Croke Park.
I got the tickets I wanted, but it’s highly unlikely that being in the waiting room benefitted me in any way beyond giving me some psychological comfort. When the presale opened at 9 am, I was randomly assigned a place in the queue. Anecdotally, I can say that whenever I’ve been ‘early’ for sales, I have been most successful in my ticket purchases, but maybe this is just some kind of confirmation bias. Critics of the virtual queuing system say it only serves to drive hype and protect ticket platforms from criticism over server crashes.
Certainly, waiting in a queue and watching yourself inch closer to the top makes it more likely that you will make an impulse purchase once you’re granted access, as you have no idea what’s going on with sales as you’re waiting in that queue and are warned by Ticketmaster not to navigate away from the page. New rules around ticket sales and virtual queues will be revealed in November, part of the EU’s Digital Fairness Act, which will allow fans to see how many tickets of each price are available as they wait in a virtual queue; however, it may be several years before the changes are implemented.
While I maintain that increasingly deranged presale setups are not in anybody’s interest, what is the solution? I certainly can’t imagine a return to old school overnight queuing, and it’s difficult to imagine a truly fair system of ticket distribution, especially when there is so little opacity in event promotion and sales.
Oasis tickets for their 2027 tour go on sale today, and they’ve implemented a sign-up scheme to allocate codes and chances to purchase to ‘real fans’ on a staggered basis, in part to avoid criticism after last year’s dynamic pricing fiasco.
But with the cheapest tickets for Slane coming in at almost €200, it’s difficult to find any working class solidarity in the practice. Then again, if the fans are willing to pay it, what’s going to change?
My ticket for The Point in 1997 was £19. According to the Centre for Economics, Politics and History’s inflation calculator that’s around €44 in today’s money.
What I’m watching
I’m a sucker for anything dystopian or post-apocalyptic so it was easy to be glued to Channel 4’s new reality survival show Apocalypse. The first two episodes were a little disappointing because it seems to be going more for drama than survival, but I’ll stick with it and long for the halcyon days of Shipwrecked on T4.
Anyone who’s watching might be interested in the contributions on Reddit of someone claiming to be Ioan, the Welsh farmer from the show who has been criticising the editing and direction. If you have any survival show recommendations, leave them in the comments.
What I was coveting before realising it’s almost certainly AI
This ebook projector. How does it work? Surely the pages don’t turn like that. And doesn’t the lady put the remote straight into the bath at the end?
What I’m truly coveting
The skills to make one of these ‘knitted lights’ by @craftsbyjas.
Emer will be back next Friday morning with more recommendations.
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