Photo: Courtesy of Ticketmaster
Everyone, everyone! After nearly fifteen years of silence and incredible tension, the second coming of Christ, Oasis, the band you know for that one song that always gets played by your weird alcoholic friend with an out of tune guitar by the campfire, are finally back!
Despite the jokes that I've tossed around, I think Oasis are a really important and influential band and the announcement of their reunion has given me hope in humanity. If the Gallagher brothers are finally speaking to each other again, maybe the world can learn to stop sucking for a little bit. And that is how you write a lie.
Yeah, surprise, I don't actually care that much about Oasis, but what I do care about is Ticketmaster.
Yep, this is just another article about Ticketmaster, the concert ticketing service that basically plays god over both touring artists who're just trying to make a living and the fans who just want to see their favorite songs being played live.
You might remember them from their greatest hits such as, screwing over Pearl Jam fans, and screwing over Taylor Swift fans, and screwing over Bruce Springsteen fans. These issues are due in large part thanks to Ticketmaster's dynamic pricing model, which can send tickets skyrocketing if there's even a slight interest in the act performing.
Ticketmaster played a large part in why I didn't wind up going to see the band Death Grips last year, as the actual paying fans who wanted to see them in my local area were immediately given a price tag of 150$. Death Grips should not have Coldplay ticket prices for a venue the size of a Denny's.
And it seems that issue still marches onward as Oasis couldn't even have their sites up for an hour without fans wanting to tear the lips off the duo. Due to the large demand for the band, fans not only had to wait hours to even access the site to buy the tickets, but when finally prompted to do so, the prices soared by upwards of $220!
Oasis, a band that was often considered music for the "working class man", now only accessible to the upper class. Not that that really matters anyway, it's possible that they probably had a hand in jamming up the prices in the way that they did, meanwhile premium tickets for Blur at Wembley Stadium last year didn't soar that high.
Ticketmaster's model has now created such outrage that they're now being actively investigated by the U.K. government, but even then, does that really matter?
The dictator known as Ticketmaster has had a chokehold on the music industry for nearly half a century now. They've actively pissed off every major artist and their fanbases. They've been investigated time and time again by different governments and agencies.
It doesn't matter how loud you are or whether you split the company from it's subsidiaries, Ticketmaster will forever be there to ruin the experience of live art.
They're quite literally too big to fail.
But maybe I should do what most Oasis fans do and not look back in anger...ironic given how long the brothers went without speaking to each other, but whatever.
