I could have written this yesterday given how predictable it was. After many of you followed my guide to getting Oasis tickets on Ticketmaster, the platform itself has left thousands disappointed. From social media and Google Trends, it’s clear that more fans have been left disappointed by Ticketmaster’s technical issues than have actually bought tickets.
One particular technical issue I’ve seen reported across my friends’ accounts and those of people on Reddit, is after a long wait the system crashes completely. One Reddit user said, “I was 22nd in the queue, my friend was 357,000 in the queue. I went through the whole process, got to “buy now” and then the whole thing crashed, kicked me out, and sent me back to the end of the line (which is now nearly 600k long). A complete joke, set up for failure”.
Has Ticketmaster Crashed?
Yes. Ticketmaster’s approach to selling tickets to gigs like this is to have a waiting room and let people queue up. The reason for this is to avoid 500,000 people hitting the ticket pages together and causing the website to crash.
However, this approach hasn’t worked. Which is particularly annoying when you think of the fairly excessive fees a monopoly like Ticketmaster gets to charge customers. Despite those fees, the company hasn’t invested enough in their website infrastructure.
The specific error many are seeing is “Error 503 Backend.max.conn reached. Error 54113”. This is telling us three pieces of information. The “503 Service Unavailable” is an HTTP status code that indicates the server is temporarily unable to handle the request. This is often due to, amongst some other possibilities, the server being overloaded.
Backend.max.conn reached suggests that the backend server has reached its maximum number of concurrent connections. In other words, the server has hit a limit on how many simultaneous requests it can handle, and it can’t process any more until some of the existing connections are closed or resources are freed up.
Error 54113 is likely an internal code used by Ticketmaster.
Some might be tempted to say “ah sure, lots of people wanted tickets this was always going to happen”, but it shouldn’t. The errors here suggest that Ticketmaster has configured their server capacity and queuing system incorrectly. Leaving many Oasis fans with their mornings wasted.
Are Oasis Tickets Sold Out?
Oddly, no. Sure enough, there’s a large number of resale tickets available on Viagogo, though just for the UK at the moment, from scalpers who were in early to resell at a profit. Something the band has done little to avoid. Bands like Rammstein take steps their fans cannot be overcharged massive fees for gigs, but Oasis haven’t taken that step unfortunately. Ireland doesn’t seem to appear on Viagogo or Stub Hub any more owing to our anti-tout laws.
However, tickets are still on Ticketmaster. Given the site’s technical issues, and the concerts extremely high pricing, people are either getting kicked out of the queue, hitting technical issues or deciding not to buy for the price.
Croke Park’s 82,000 capacity over two nights doesn’t appear to be sold out yet. But I joined at around 10am and was 400,000 in the queue. Given the queue and the price of tickets, I’m more than a little happy to have slept in today!
What is Ticketmaster In Demand Pricing?
There are a range of tickets on sale for the gig, but the most affordable one at the minute when you do get through is “In Demand Standing Ticket”. In Demand tickets is similar to Uber’s Surge Pricing. Something is popular, so the retailer assumes you’ll pay more for it.
Effectively, In Demand pricing lets Ticketmaster themselves become the tout, overcharging for tickets simply because it knows Oasis fans are desperate and willing to pay more than the average concert price.
After hours of queuing, Oasis fans are finding out that to get an average standing ticket costs €415.50 per ticket, before the added insult of a booking fee. That’s a regular standing ticket, no added VIP-benefits, merch or the likes. I’d expect Liam and Noel Gallagher to carry me into the venue and buy me a pint for that price.
After seeing the prices, one Oasis fan gave up and said “that’s 2 hours of my life I won’t get back.”
All in all, both Ticketmaster and Oasis have quite a bit to answer for here. Ireland has a dedicated tout law but they don’t come into play here, as the issue is more Ticketmaster determining the face value price of tickets. It’s possible the band would have sat with Ticketmaster at some stage and possibly given the steer to “do what you can to maximise profit”.
You would have thought at some stage Oasis would have been worried about their image, but in hindsight that was a bit silly from me.
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