Dynamic Ticket Pricing

Debate between Jim Shannon and Caroline Dinenage

Tuesday 10th September 2024 Commons Chamber

[Dame Caroline Dinenage (Gosport) (Con)]

I welcome the Minister to his place and very much look forward to working with him to promote our world-class creative industries, including our music industry and all the other fantastic sectors that his Department promotes.

Today, I want to talk about music ticketing and recognise the remarkable circumstances that have provoked this debate. News of the Oasis reunion has dominated the news cycle for the last week or so, but some might say for all the wrong reasons. What should have been a moment to celebrate one of the UK’s most significant cultural exports—and the chance to revisit the music that, for many, me included, was the soundtrack to our youth—has morphed into a conversation about exploitative practices in the music industry that hurt fans and the grassroots sector. Some of the issues have been rumbling away for years. In fact, earlier this year, the Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport published a report on grassroots music that outlined some of the major challenges facing the live music ecosystem and suggested some ways forward.

The Minister knows the facts. On 31 August, some 14 million people from 158 countries logged on to a digital queue to buy tickets to the Oasis Live 25 reunion tour, 15 years after the band broke up and 30 years on from their seminal first album, “Definitely Maybe”. Fans were locked in an online queue for up to 10 hours and, when many of them, it seemed almost at random, made it to the front of the queue, the tickets were in many cases more than double the price that had been advertised. The dynamic pricing mechanism employed by Oasis, their promoters and management via Ticketmaster served to increase the price of tickets in line with demand, but in reality it resulted in a kind of lucky dip game in which the price got worse and worse by no clear mechanism except the secret and opaque rules of a computer algorithm in the hands of Ticketmaster.

I should declare an interest: after four hours of queuing, I had become wistful about the halcyon days of real-life physical box offices, where we queued almost overnight to get our tickets, but at least we could see the queue in front of us and we knew how long we would have to wait.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I commend the hon. Member for bringing this debate. She is right and many of my constituents experienced the issue that she mentions. We understand the economic principles of supply and demand, but we also understand the principle of price gouging. For those who believed they would be charged one price to have just a few moments to decide whether they would be prepared to pay double is unfair pressure. We must always encourage free trade, but we must also be mindful of consumer protection in Strangford, Gosport or any part of this United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

[Dame Caroline Dinenage]

I could not have said it better myself—that is exactly what it is. We understand the laws of supply and demand, but we also understand the laws of transparency and fairness. What is more, once ticket purchasers were through to the payment screen, fans realised that they only had a very limited time to decide whether the hugely inflated prices were worth paying. Someone compared the ticket purchase after such a long wait to the dopamine rush of a gambler. The £150 to £400 price increase meant that the transaction was no longer a choice, but more of an impulse buy.

I have heard many people say that the dynamic pricing method is used effectively in other sectors, and that the technology is a perfect demonstration of the dynamism of a free market. Even within the music industry itself, there is dispute as to whether dynamic pricing has a place and is an acceptable way forward.