What Comes After the Live Nation-Ticketmaster Antitrust Ruling
Gallagher’s profane monologue went viral on account of its absurdity—four people on payroll to brew a single cup of tea? But the rocker’s screed contained a truth, one that has substantially shaped the contemporary ticket-buying panopticon. After listeners drifted away from buying physical releases such as CDs and vinyl, starting in the two-thousands, touring has become a critical means for artists to earn their incomes.
A sobering Citi report noted that in 2017, the same year that Gallagher raged about his tea, the music industry generated forty-three billion dollars in revenue, of which artists saw only twelve per cent, mostly from touring. Citing a Billboard report, Business Insider noted that U2, the most handsomely paid group that year, saw about ninety-five per cent of their income come from touring in 2017. Present-day streaming giants such as Spotify pay cents per stream—a pro-rata system that overwhelmingly benefits the artists raking in the highest number of total listens. The rise of streaming has compounded the importance of touring for artists—if groups can afford to tour at all.
The iridescent glare of social media has further turbocharged the concert industry’s dominance. In general, fans posting online, in 2026, has become a smorgasbord of aspirational boasting, in a turn away from a more modest form of life-style exhibitionism once derided as “humblebragging.” And the ubiquity of posts that take viewers on experiential journeys—such as “come with me” videos popularized by influencers on TikTok—has accelerated the feeling that one doesn’t exist in the world, digitally speaking, if one isn’t physically present at Justin Bieber’s Coachella set and documenting it on one’s phone.
We are living in a post-COVID culture, and since the world began reopening for mass gatherings in 2021, fans’ desire to partake in experience-driven travel has fuelled the demand for live events. In turn, the live-music industry has rocketed to revenues greater than anyone had imagined.
Back in my West Coast bedroom in August, 2024, I continued wrestling with the Ticketmaster seating charts. Why was I willing to go to such lengths for a concert lasting two hours? Yes, I yearned to be walloped by Oasis’s meaty nineties riffs, but that didn’t explain my demented inclination to put myself through this stress. Rather, I had become possessed by the impossibility of this cultural landmark—in which the two feuding Gallagher brothers had decided to finally quash their rivalry and perform shimmering music together again. The chance to witness the reunion had stoked my worst impulses: an irrational fear of missing out, a willingness to overextend myself financially, a penchant for annoying my then fiancé, now husband by adopting the band’s familiar turns of phrase (i.e., “maybeh,” “Biblical”).
Suddenly, Ticketmaster prompted me to enter my credit-card information. I had less than five minutes to choose the Oasis gig in Cardiff or Edinburgh. Considering the Gallagher brothers’ infamous history of holding grudges, I wasn’t entirely optimistic that the band would be able to stay together through Edinburgh, but they could probably keep it together for the début. Cardiff it was. Five hundred and thirty-four dollars later, four tickets for the inaugural show at Principality Stadium landed in my inbox. I dashed off a text to my brother, a fellow Oasis head, that I’d secured us and our partners four tickets to see them in a year’s time: “We’re going to the first gig lads!!!!!!”
I had bested truly dubious statistics: fourteen million people worldwide had tried to snag tickets for this tour. This outsized interest in Oasis had prompted Ticketmaster to employ “dynamic pricing,” which increases fees commensurate to real-time demand. (Oasis later said that they hadn’t consciously opted into dynamic pricing, and that it created an “unacceptable experience” for fans; when they announced dates in the U.S., South America, and Asia, the band’s team said that dynamic pricing would not be employed for those shows.) I was struck by a variable response to gouging: dynamic pricing had sparked a far bigger outcry abroad than in the U.S. If anything, other Americans I spoke with seemed pleasantly surprised with the cost of Oasis tickets across the pond versus what they’d pay closer to home, not unlike Swifties travelling for the European leg of the Eras Tour for a fraction of the price. Navigating extortionate ticketing systems in the name of experience has, apparently, become routine.
