WE’VE all said it – and we’ve all heard the inevitable reply.
“I’m stuck in traffic.”
“No, you’re not stuck in traffic – you are the traffic.”
That old one came to Squinter as he watched, read and listened to the exhausting psychodrama that’s the Oasis concert in Dublin. Squinter’s not a fan – let’s get that out of the way. But unlike many others, he resisted the urge to comment on how rubbish the Gallagher brothers are or how stupid people are to be spending a fortune on tickets to hear Liam Gallagher singing the same songs he sang at a rainy Boucher Road a fortnight ago when tickets cost thirty quid.
Nope. If people want to pay the extra hundreds to see Noel standing beside him when he sings them again in Dublinlet them go ahead, and Squinter hopes they have a great time.
But this ticket kerfuffle – that’s another thing entirely; another thing on which Squinter has claimed his right to have a say. And the first thing is that if you really believe the Ticketmaster website broke because of the number of people trying to get on it Squinter’s got a bridge from Belfast to Stranraer to sell to you.
The Ticketmaster system didn’t break – it worked exactly how it was made to work; which is to say that it kept hiccupping as it continually bumped up the price of tickets as the tickets became fewer. And fans weren’t stuck in or kicked out of the queue because the software wasn’t fit for purpose – they were stuck in or kicked out of the queue because the price of the tickets was constantly being hiked and that required a regular amount of resets to ensure the queue was as efficient and orderly as last orders on New Year’s Eve.
‘Dynamic pricing’, it’s called, and hotels and airlines do it too. The difference being that hotels and airlines are answerable only to boards and shareholders when they get the arm into Jo Public. Ticketmaster is answerable to the Gallagher brothers, who can decide to charge whatever price they like. Oh, sure, they can blame Ticketmaster, the concert promoter, or even the boogie, but the simple fact is that when it comes to concerts The Talent (in this case the Gallaghers) hold the whip hand.
It’s an inexact science, but estimates of how much Liam and Noel will make vary from £50 million each to £100 million each; and with total income from the concerts said to be up around the half-billion mark, nobody’s going to say a dickybird if the Gallaghers tell them to stop messing the punters about settle for a few million less in the credit union (they’re Irish, after all).
That simple fact, you might think, would put the brothers in a sticky position in relation to their public image because nobody wants to earn the disapproval of their fans. But when everybody who’s desperate for tickets and is being treated abominably blames Ticketmaster’s software, that sound you hear is Liam cackling into the mic with his hands behind his back while Tory Noel harmonises about people on benefits.
So, no, you’re not stuck in traffic when you’re on a queue on the M1 stretching back to Lurgan – you are the traffic. And as you stare at your phone or laptop waiting for your place in the Oasis queue to move forward a bit while the ticket prices rocket and you curse Ticketmaster and not the Gallaghers, you’re not being abused by a travelling circus of cynicism and greed – you are that circus.
