OASIS fans who saw ticket costs soar by hundreds of pounds due to ‘dynamic pricing’ are entitled to sue Ticketmaster, lawyers say.
Music lovers were left shocked by standard tickets more than doubling from £148 to £355 for the reunion tour, which will be the band’s first since breaking up in 2009.
Following the ticket furore, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) received 450 complaints about Ticketmaster adverts for the Oasis gigs.
A spokesperson for the UK’s regulator of advertising said the complainants argue that the adverts made “misleading claims about availability and pricing”.
Ticketmaster has said it does not set prices and its website says this is down to the “event organiser” who “has priced these tickets according to their market value”.
Lawyers have said that using the system – which sees prices rise when supply is low and demand is high – could have breached consumer law.
Customers were not forewarned that costs would surge from the advertised £148 to more than double that amount.
Fieldfisher partner Richard Pike said people who bought tickets could bring collective High Court claim against Ticketmaster.
He told The Telegraph: “I don’t know about you but I wasn’t expecting there to be this dynamic pricing. It only became apparent after I’d been on the phone for quite some time already.
“You can see psychologically there’s commitment there. When you’ve waited that long already, you’re liable to pay more than you otherwise would. They are taking advantage of you.”
But, he added, the legal costs of bringing such an action could well be greater than a potential award, which would only be in the hundreds of pounds per person.
Tickets were only available through online retailer Ticketmaster.
Lawyers said that queuing customers not being told how many tickets remained could have potentially breached consumer protection rules.
While dynamic pricing is not banned by those rules, businesses are not permitted to mislead customers about the cost of a product.
Trading Standards said earlier this week that Ticketmaster could have broken the law by not telling customers that prices would rise amid high demand before they started queuing for tickets.
Leigh Day solicitor Maksymilian Hara said if there was a breach of competition rules, customers could in theory be entitled to bring joint action at the Competition Appeal Tribunal.
But he echoed Mr Pike’s comments that any potential reward may be outweighed by legal costs.
The long-awaited Oasis reunion tour drew huge attention from fans as it will see the Manchester-formed Britpop band on stage together for the first time since their major split in 2009.
On August 31, they revealed the general sale tickets for their upcoming 17 UK and Ireland gigs had sold out in less than a day.
But many fans missed out as they battled website issues and being mislabelled as bots.
Other international dates are still to be announced, but no more UK shows will be added to their tour, it is understood.
The Government pledged to look into the use of dynamic pricing in its forthcoming review of the secondary gig sales market.
A boss of a major resale site has claimed ticket surge pricing could have a “huge impact” on the leisure industry if people are priced out of attending events,
Oscar Kriek, director of partnerships at TicketSwap, said: “The impact is bigger than just this one event.
“If these very popular events are implementing these kind of pricing strategies, it means that there’s less room for other events, because the consumers can only spend a specific amount of money once.
“Which means that if they spend these huge amounts on these single events, then (the) leisure budget overall throughout the year will be significantly impacted, which means that there is less room to visit other leisure experiences, so other concerts or festivals.
“So this has a huge impact. Therefore, I don’t think this is something that we should want as an industry.”
Mr Kriek explained that ticket sites like Ticketmaster will charge a service fee or they will take a percentage for facilitating the sale, but that the main split is between the promoters and the artist.
“Usually, how it works with a concert tour is that the promoter sells the ticket and there’s a split between the promoter and the band, so the band will get a percentage of the selling price of the ticket, so that’s the face value, but in this case, it would be the dynamic pricing”, he said.
“The eventual ticket price will be split with the percentage that’s in the agreement between the promoter and the band.
“So the band will definitely see something from that additional revenue.”
Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy released a statement on Sunday calling the inflated selling of Oasis tickets “incredibly depressing”.
She added: “This Government is committed to putting fans back at the heart of music.
“So we will include issues around the transparency and use of dynamic pricing, including the technology around queuing systems which incentivise it, in our forthcoming consultation on consumer protections for ticket resales.”
The CMA has said it is “urgently reviewing” the ticketing market and that it is looking forward to working with the Government on the issue.
The Sun has contacted Ticketmaster for comment.
