Scalpers offer hundreds of US Oasis tickets before they are on sale
UPDATE: Ticket scalpers are offering hundreds thousands of tickets at grossly inflated prices to upcoming Oasis North America tour dates before they are even on sale.
Scalpers offer hundreds of US Oasis tickets
As of Wednesday morning hundreds of specific seats were being sold at prices as high as $$220 to Oasis shows in NY, LA, Chicago, Toronto and Mexico City despite the actual on sale date not being until Friday October 4th.
It’s not really a ticket at all…
To the fan, these look like real tickets, but the seller is just saying they believe they will have a ticket available after the on sale. Using purchase bots and other questionably illegal technologies, the scalpers can often fulfill the order – at least with a similar seat. If not, the “tickets” are cancelled and the fan is left without access to the show.
The practice is called “speculative” or “ghost” ticketing and is still legal on most states.
VividSeats calls the practice Seat Saver: “This Seat Saver listing is a service backed by our 100% buyer guarantee in which the seller is offering to buy tickets for you for a fixed price in the listed section.”
StubHub, Viagogo and other resale platforms are also selling Oasis ghost tickets. While ticket sellers sometimes include information that these are not actual tickets, very often they do not.
Particularly given that Oasis decided to forgo dynamic pricing for these shows, the fan is paying hundreds of dollars more than they would have if they’d gone direct.
Cumulatively ticket scalpers will likely earn hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars selling and reselling North American Oasis tickets to unwitting fans.
Fighting back
“These fans think they got tickets of a lifetime but instead just dropped hundreds of dollars one something that doesn’t even exist,” said Nathaniel Marro, Executive Director of booking agent and music manager trade group NITO. “The worst part is, they could be waiting months for tickets to arrive only to end up empty handed. Spec ticketing should be banned, period. It’s common sense, you shouldn’t be able to sell something you don’t actually possess.”
NITO (National Independent Talent Organization) is pushing for state and federal legislation alongside NIVA and their partners in the FixTheTix coalition that would make the practice illegal. NITO recently filed an official complaint asking the FTC to investigate possible illegal use of technologies by scalpers.
Bruce Houghton is the Founder and Editor of Hypebot, a Senior Advisor at Bandsintown, President of the Skyline Artists Agency, and a Berklee College Of Music professor.
