Just hours after Noel and Liam Gallagher announced that Oasis would return to the stage for the first time in 15 years, someone posted the following on X:

“Imagine waiting 15 years for Oasis to reform and then losing the tickets to 21-year-old Chloe from Stockport who just wants to see Wonderwall live.”

This got a lot of likes and comments. On the one hand, it’s just standard gatekeeping with a dash of mild misogyny. But when I read it, my first thought was: Ah yes. Here we go again.

It was clear that demand for Oasis tickets would be huge. They were once the biggest band in the UK and had perhaps the best-selling album of the 1990s before splitting up in 2009 following a backstage brawl at a festival near Paris. Whatever you think of the band’s later work, the band’s first two albums were instrumental in the creation of Britpop, the 1990s alternative rock movement that included ’60s bands like Blur. It’s easy to forget that, as the music itself has been overshadowed in the years since by the Gallagher brothers’ extremely public hatred of each other. They were very good at it, and the feud was, in a way, entertaining to watch: Noel memorably described Liam as “a man with a fork in a world of soup”, something like that.

I, too, sang “Wonderwall” wrong after five drinks, but I was a kid in the ’90s and remember the group mostly for the drive-time radio blah they produced in the mid-2000s. I have to say, it was a bit surprising to learn from tweets like the one above that Oasis have a lot of younger fans, but it seems that way. Part of me wonders if that’s partly because all available cultural content from the ’90s has so much prestige simply because it’s from 30 years ago. For many Gen Z, Oasis is music their parents listened to when they were kids. But whatever the reason, it seemed like people of all stripes and ages were excited: a chance to hear Oasis live, whether to relive glory days or to see their favorite band together for the first time.

But they were also angry, just like the man who invented a young woman to be angry with at X before tickets even went on sale. In fact, people started getting angry even before the reunion itself. was even announced, even though the possibility had only been hinted at in a cryptic post on Oasis’ official social media accounts. And in a way, they had good reason to be. In the recent era of mega-tours, fans have been repeatedly confronted with the uncomfortable reality of how ticket sales work – and largely work against them.

Lo and behold, when Saturday came and tickets went on sale to the public, it was a shambles. I stood in a pub looking over the shoulder of the woman in front of me who was staring desolately at her phone which showed almost 30,000 people ahead of her in the online queue for Oasis tickets. I heard from friends of friends who had been kicked out of the queue after waiting for hours and giving up. People took to social media and the national press to vent their frustration. One Guardian writer complained of spending a whopping £1,500 on four tickets. “When you’ve queued all day and the ticket price has more than doubled, I just think they’ve broken their contract with the working class,” one disgruntled fan told the BBC.

It seems that every time a major stadium tour is announced since COVID lockdowns ended, fans flock back to the stands in droves and people learn about corporate greed again. Dynamic pricing—similar to flights and Ubers, where the more people book, the higher the prices go—infuriated Bruce Springsteen fans when his 2022 tour tickets went on sale, leading to center-stand tickets going for as much as $5,000. It was similar at Harry Styles’ concerts at Slane Castle in Ireland last year. And all that’s without even mentioning the outrage sparked when Ticketmaster folded due to unprecedented demand for Taylor Swift’s “Eras” tour, an event that led to a flurry of proposed legislation, a lawsuit from the U.S. Department of Justice, and Republicans and Democrats joining forces to question ticket sellers on Capitol Hill. Incidentally, none of these developments have made dynamic pricing less legal.

Once again, Ticketmaster was quick to point out that artists, management and promoters must accept dynamic pricing, although Ticketmaster retains a significant percentage for its own service fees. Ticketmaster is also a subsidiary of Live Nation, one of the promoters of the Oasis tour. Oasis has not yet commented on the matter.

All of which means that people have about 10 minutes to really get excited about the news that a band they like is going back on tour before material reality sets in. The point at which someone, after hours of waiting in an online queue, can decide within seconds whether they suddenly want to spend three times the amount they were promised is the point at which they are being exploited. That seems like a pretty uncontroversial opinion to me. And I know all the obvious background here: that in the age of streaming, musicians are more reliant than ever on live performances to make a living, that venues are struggling to stay open, all that. But still. Still! A surprise price of £355 ($465) for something advertised at £140 ($183), even if it’s “just a gig,” seems bad and wrong to me, however one wants to lay the blame at “market forces” – especially since the Department of Justice has accused Live Nation of hampering some of those market forces by having a monopoly.

At the risk of taking too seriously a superficially inconsequential news story like “Ageing brothers agree to be in the same room again”, I find it depressing to watch this cycle over and over again. Bands announce gigs, fans get excited, fans get upset about not getting tickets, fans battle ticket-selling websites and either don’t get tickets or end up having to pay a month’s rent for them. I have nothing to lose in this particular game. I didn’t go out of my way to get tickets. In this scenario, I would be a “Chloe from Stockport”: sure, I’d love to see Oasis play that one song. But – and while I accept that this is the opinion of a crackpot, that doesn’t make it any less true – it’s sad because it’s become a normal moment in public life to watch ordinary people who want to have fun being squeezed for every last drop to make rich people even richer. I don’t really care that some guy with a collection of fishing hats in his wardrobe will have overpaid to wave eight beer cans in a row at Wembley next year. But I do care (with annoyance) that incidents like this force me to think about how dynamic pricing underpins almost everything in life, whether it is made clear to us or not. not.