Can The Oasis Tour Save The UK’s Dying Music Scene?
The Gallagher brothers’ announcement of an Oasis reunion tour has ignited a firestorm of excitement and controversy. The band’s first performance together in 15 years has fans eagerly anticipating a ‘once in a generation event,’ but the ticketing process has been marred by technical glitches, accusations of price gouging, and a broader debate about the state of the UK’s live music industry.
A week of the media hyping up the tour as a ‘once in a generation event’ and a myriad of memes later the pre-sale tickets went on sale via a ballot that allocated tickets based on ‘fans’ knowledge of the band. The controversial system caused generational conflicts to emerge on social media with older fans proclaiming themselves entitled to have priority for tickets over younger ones.
Finally, on Saturday morning an estimated 14 million spent several hours patiently waiting in a virtual queue, already 500,000+ long within minutes of the site going live, hoping to secure their chance to witness this ‘historic’ moment in British pop culture.
By lunchtime, the excitement of many quickly turned to rage as thousands took to social media to voice their frustration at bugs and glitches that plagued the site and unceremoniously removed them from the digital queue – losing their place in the process.
Those lucky enough to survive the quagmire of the queue and make it to the booking page experienced one of the most blatant and monstrous displays of Capitalist excess and greed imaginable in modern times.
Ticketmaster, the US company responsible for distributing the Oasis tour tickets, slyly implemented its new ‘dynamic pricing strategy’ raising the price of a standard ticket from £135 to £350 while customers waited leaving only minutes to decide if they wanted to pay the grossly inflated price or miss out on the opportunity they’d waited hours for.
This more than doubling of the face value of the tickets left many fans ‘looking back in anger’ (sorry) and feeling ripped off at the amount they were forced to pay to see one of the vanguards of the Britpop sub-genre.
In response to the public backlash and outrage the band issued a statement saying that “It needs to be made clear that Oasis leave decisions on ticketing and pricing entirely to their promoters and management” and that “at no time had any awareness that dynamic pricing was going to be used.”
Ticketmaster on the other hand claims that “they did not set ticket pricing policy – artists and promoters did”. The company, recently valued in the tens of billions of dollars, have defended the usage of dynamic pricing comparing it to airlines or hotels that already use dynamic pricing during periods of ‘high demand’ as the industry standard.
Ticketmaster claims they brought in the practice of surge pricing in 2022 allegedly to stop ticket touts from bulk buying gig tickets from their site to resell at a higher-than-face value price to desperate punters – how ironic.
The stock price of Live Nation, Ticketmaster’s parent company, has increased 18% so far this year seeing its value increase an extra £1.5 billion in the last month alone. The bulk of this new value comes from the exploitation of music lovers around the world who are forced to pay increasingly higher ticket prices, a plethora of fees, numerous service charges and now dynamic pricing and high volume premiums. Is there no limit to this corporate profiteering?
The Ticketmaster fiasco has caught the attention of the UK Government who have announced it will conduct a consultation on concert ticket resale websites later this Autumn. The UK Competition and Market Authority (CMA) have launched an ‘urgent review’ into Ticketmaster and the practice of dynamic pricing for music event tickets.
The European Commission has also announced that it will be looking into the use of dynamic pricing for gig tickets as concerns about unfair trading practices continue to increase amongst European Parliamentarians.
This isn’t the first time that Ticketmaster’s pricing practices have pissed off a government. In 2023, the US Senate convened a three-hour antitrust hearing about Ticketmaster and its parent company Live Nation monopolisation of the ticketing industry and unfair business practices – seemingly to little effect.
While the country was busy gorging on Oasis-flavoured member berries. The Music Venue Trust (MVT) took to Instagram to post a sobering reminder about the dire state of the UK’s music scene. The graphic shared by the trust showed that only 11 of the 34 grassroots music venues that took a chance on a young Oasis during their debut Supersonic tour in 1994 remain open today.
According to the MVT’s Annual Report, 125 music venues either closed down or stopped hosting live music in 2023, that’s 13% of the total number of venues left in the UK shutting down in just one year. This travesty represents the loss of over 4,000 jobs, 14,500 cancelled events, and countless opportunities for emerging young showcase their talents.
In their 2023 report, the Music Venus Trust highlight that over a third of the 835 remaining grassroots venues are now actively losing money and are in danger of either ceasing to host live music or shutting down altogether.
The MVT estimated that 35% of music venues have closed in the last 20 years, although once you factor in the previous and this year’s closures that is likely to be closer to 50%. If this current pace of closures continues, an average of two venues a week, the UK will have no grassroots venues left by Autumn/Winter 2028.
While an estimated 23.6 million, over a third of the UK population, visited a grassroots music venue in 2023, funding and governmental support for these venues has failed to recover from the devastating impact of austerity, lockdowns, and decades of unchecked corporate greed.
The recent State of the Arts Report found that the UK has the lowest level of spending on culture of any European nation. The report also shows that local government funding for culture has decreased by 48% in England, 40% in Scotland, and 29% in Wales and the funding for arts has been reduced by 22% in England, 22% in Scotland, 25% in Wales and a massive 66% in Northern Ireland.
New research from the Local Government Association (LGA) found that council spending on arts and culture has fallen in real terms by £2.3 billion over the 14 years of vicious ideologically-driven budget cuts under the Coalition and successive Tory governments.
Basically, in the years before the Tories decimated local council budgets, devastated funding for the arts, and crashed the economy multiple bands played at the numerous local pubs every weekend, you were spoilt for choice when it came to touring international bands, grassroots music venues were plentiful, and music festivals were affordable.
It’s not just a lack of central and local government funding that has resulted in the loss of so many UK grassroots music venues, spiralling costs, rampant wealth inequality, Brexit, the still ongoing war on drugs, and the country’s continually declining mental health are also to blame for the continual decline of these once vital cultural touchstones.
Technology isn’t innocent in their demise either. The rise of smartphones, social media, and algorithmically engineered streaming services have all artificially influenced the evolution of music trends and tastes over the last few decades.
Younger generations now have a propensity to ‘discover’ or be pushed new music through streaming services like YouTube and Spotify rather than through more traditional means like radio, word of mouth or seeing new musicians at local gigs.
Ironically, one of the largest contributing factors to the decline of grassroots music venues in the UK is the rise of big arena tours and large-scale music festivals becoming a golden ticket for shameless capitalists and soulless corporations to bleed culture dry.
The Gallagher brothers will perform to an estimated 1.3 million people on their upcoming tour and in the process likely make more money in one summer than they did in the entire 1990s and double their net worth in the process.
Birmingham City University estimates that the tour could make over £400 million in ticket sales and other income from meet and greets, VIP and exclusive packages, sponsorships, merchandise and a possible Netflix/Amazon Prime deal. Netting the duo £50 million in the process – hopefully enough to cover Noel’s recent allegedly rather expensive divorce.
The fact that the Oasis ‘25 tour is expected to be a similar size to Taylor Swift’s Eras tour, estimated by Barclays Bank to have contributed an additional £1 billion to the UK economy, shows that there are still people with money who want to experience live music in the UK. Yet 125 grassroots venues still closed last year with many likely more likely to shutter this year.
What can be done to save the UK’s ailing grassroots music scene?
Ahead of the recent General Election The Music Venue Trust (MVT) launched a ‘Manifesto for Grassroots Music’ outlining steps to reduce the epidemic of venue closures in the UK. The manifesto calls for the abolition of VAT on tickets, a review of business rates for Grassroots venues and a proposed £1 levy on all arena and stadium tickets to generate funding for the dying sector.
The MVT proposals would emulate a similar system currently employed in France that effectively taxes the gross face value of event tickets to create a centralised pot used to fund artists, venues, and promoters across the country.
While the MVT recommendations fell mostly on deaf ears, the Britishpost-rock electronicore pioneers Enter Shikari committed to donating £1 from every ticket sold for their 2023 arena tour to help support the funding of grassroots music venues. Unfortunately, few other acts or artists have made such a commitment since.
so with all that being said, while the Oasis tour may add £1 billion to the UK Economy, make a load of millionaires even richer, and send the sales of ‘gear’ through to the stratosphere, it won’t help the plethora of dying grassroots music venues or struggling young artists desperate to get on stage and perform across the country.
Ultimately, I cannot help but feel that the reunion of a mediocre pop band fronted by two capricious cocaine-fuelled multi-millionaire, clash traitors decades after the peak of the band’s popularity being heralded as ‘the great cultural event of our times’ is a dire indictment of the UK’s current music scene. D’ you know what I mean?
Given the tumultuous nature of the brother’s relationship several UK bookies are already taking bets that the reunion won’t happen or if it does they won’t complete the entire tour with some even taking bets on which venue it will be when the brothers inevitably break up again. So I guess we can say that the Oasis tour is definitely maybe going ahead next year.
In conclusion, the Oasis tour, while a financial boon for the band and potentially the UK economy, casts a long shadow over the struggling grassroots music scene. It serves as a stark reminder of the challenges faced by small venues and emerging artists in an industry increasingly dominated by corporate interests and superstar acts. The tour’s success underscores the need for urgent action to support and revitalise the UK’s music ecosystem, ensuring that future generations have the opportunity to experience the thrill of live music and discover the next Oasis. The question remains: will this reunion be an oasis for the industry or simply a mirage, offering a fleeting glimpse of hope in an otherwise bleak landscape?
Written for Legacy Culture by Simpa
