THE PAST WEEK has seen a lot of hand-wringing about the sale of tickets for next summer’s Oasis gigs at Croke Park.
Between the intense online queues, the website snafus and eye-watering ‘dynamic’ pricing, it’s enough to make someone wish for the days of real-life ticket buying.
Up until the early 2000s, when online sales started to take over, fans would queue for hours or even camp on the street overnight in order to be in with a chance to buy tickets to a gig.
Ticketmaster launched its online service in Ireland during the dot com boom in 1999, with an RTÉ report from the time noting that venue owners were “waiting to see whether tickets by internet would click”. We know how that ended – click it did.
Before online ticketing, you had to queue at designated ticket counters in shops and record stores. The main ticket seller for the big gigs was, and still is, Ticketmaster, a company which was set up in the 1970s.
For high-demand gigs, fans knew that turning up at 9am on ticket day didn’t guarantee success, so some would camp overnight or queue from early in the morning to try to get their hands on a precious ticket.
But as some Irish fans – and one former HMV ticket seller – told The Journal, not knowing if you’d get a ticket was all part of the fun.
‘We’d get the train to Drogheda’
“I never queued overnight, but I definitely queued up for hours on end,” says Simon Maher of 8Radio and a media tutor in Ballyfermot College of Further Education.
Maher was one of the co-founders of Phantom FM, a Dublin-based alternative radio station which ran during the tail end of the most intense ticket-queuing years. For him, talk of queuing brings back many memories.
Differently-sized outlets held a different number of tickets, with city centre Ticketmaster counters in larger stores like HMV having the biggest allocations.
But this also meant these outlets attracted the biggest queues, so Maher and his friends came up with a nifty workaround.
“We’d get the bus to Kildare Town or the train to Drogheda, and you’d go into the local Ticketmaster counter,” he says. “You’d have a much, much better chance.”
Ticket queueing was a social event, says Maher. “You were wearing your t-shirt, your badges, because you knew you were going to be hanging out with like-minded people who were also mad about the band.”
“You’d make friends for the day – whoever was in the queue straight in front and straight behind you. There was a camaraderie where you became soldiers on the front line for that day, stopping interlopers from getting in,” Maher laughs. “There was never trouble, not that I ever saw.”
You’d only be successful in getting tickets sometimes, says Maher. “The rumours would always start – people would say ‘oh I was here before, and if you got past the door for that shop in the queue you’d never get tickets’.”
Sometimes Maher found himself queuing in Dublin when tickets for bigger gigs were being released. He recalls, “there were occasions where you’d be 50 or 60 from the top of the queue and it would be ‘try [music store] Sound Cellar’, and everyone would run down Grafton St.”
“You knew there was just a finite amount of these physical things,” he says of ticket disappointment.
There was more of a grudging acceptance there – the man has no more. You would hope maybe your friend got them in another place, but you wouldn’t know until you both got home.
Jenn Gannon, a freelance arts journalist, saw Oasis around five times in the band’s early years. She echoes Maher’s comments about camaraderie in the ticket queue. “You don’t have that anymore,” she says. “If you slept outside or did the hard graft, you felt you really earned your place at that gig.”
She and her sisters had their own ways of making sure they got tickets.
“If the phones were jammed, my sister would ring the venue directly and we were lucky with that once or twice,” she says.
But they had to get the big guns out for the Oasis Páirc Uí Caoimh gig in 1996. “I said I’d camp outside. But then I thought – people might forget Sound Cellar was there,” recalls Gannon.
“I remember getting up at 5am or 6am and going into town and waiting outside Sound Cellar, and it was the best idea because there were three or four people in front of me – and literally around the corner on HMV on Grafton St the place was completely mobbed.”
She adds: “People forget with this panic now that it was always like that with Oasis when they came to Ireland – it was always the scarcity of getting tickets, even though it might have dropped off a bit in the 2000s.”
Gannon says that we couldn’t go back to queuing exactly like we needed to in the past. “There would be absolute mobs. You can imagine trying to queue up for a Taylor Swift ticket, it would be horrific, with crowd control and security and everything that goes with that. I do think it’s sad, as you want it to be as democratic as possible for people to get tickets, and cut out those dynamic pricing fees.”
“I don’t miss the queuing, but there was probably more of a sense of anticipation,” says Maher. “One, because there were less of those big gigs around. And then the second part was there was something collegiate about hanging out with a bunch of people who were queuing for tickets to see their favorite band. It has never been replaced by being on Twitter while you’re queuing on Ticketmaster.”
Author Emer McLysaght lived in Co Kildare, and would queue for tickets at local shop Top Twenty in Naas.
“A few of us would queue together and as we started going to pubs and nightclubs we would often join the queue straight from the night out,” she recalls.
“I remember doing that particularly for U2 tickets for what was then Lansdowne Road. Princess Diana had died the night before that concert and I remember queuing outside (truly, teenage me loved a queue) and it was all anyone could talk about. We got a spot at the very front barrier for that show. I’m more of a back-of-the-pit concert goer these days. More room for dancing and being old.”
McLysaght was tenacious when trying to get tickets, and was mostly successful.
“Sometimes you’d be able to get the Top Twenty employee to reveal what their allocation of tickets was and you could count the people in the queue and you’d know you were safe,” she says.
“I remember when tickets for Oasis in Páirc Uí Chaoimh went on sale I was away on holidays with a friend’s family and I was in a phone box in Austria counselling my parents on how to get tickets. They managed to secure two, fair play to them.”
‘We were their computer’
If you lived in Blanchardstown in the early 2000s, you might have bought a gig ticket from Newstalk’s Off the Ball presenter Richie McCormack.
He worked as a sales assistant in Blanchardstown HMV and says that staff were the ones helping buyers to select the best seats.
“We were their computer,” he explains. “We’d have to decipher what the actual best seats available were, so there was a little bit of pressure.”
In 2000, McCormack queued for Slane tickets. “I just made it inside the shopping centre and the signs went up to say they were sold out. The idea of people being disappointed due to demand is nothing new – it’s just now you don’t have the imposition of having to leave your house,” he says.
Online sales also didn’t mean that fans stopped queuing entirely, and he queued for tickets to see Tom Waits when he played the Phoenix Park in 2008.
Dynamic pricing
Back in the queuing days, there was no ‘dynamic pricing’. No matter the demand, fans paid the same price for the same tickets.
“I don’t think the ability for dynamic pricing to exist would have happened when I was selling tickets,” says McCormack. “If it did, it would have not lasted as long, because you would have had face-to-face interactions with customers that would not be very pleasant based on the ballooning ticket prices. Now everybody complaining about it just screams into the one online void.”
McCormack also points out that artists do shoulder some responsibility when it comes to ticket pricing, and that musicians like The Cure’s Robert Smith have spoken out about their frustrations over the issue.
Dynamic pricing is used for things like airline tickets and hotel rooms. “But very few people love or dedicate a big part of their life to an airline or hotel,” says Simon Maher. “When it comes to stuff like music, people have a different sort of relationship there. And it doesn’t feel right – and I can’t imagine it really feels right for a band.”
Gannon echoes these concerns. “There used to be fan club rates and codes back in the day,” she points out, with some bands like UB40 doing special rates for the unemployed during the 1980s recession.
“Bands can well afford to do that now, and it seems to be something that’s gone by the wayside. If you look at Paul Heaton from the Housemartins and the Beautiful South, he grew up in Thatcher Britain and he understands those pressures, and he’s selling his tickets for a blanket €30 across the board in the UK.”
For all the supposed ease that online ticket buying can give – at least when it’s going well – all of these music fans feel some nostalgia towards the queuing days, not least because they really appreciated when they got the tickets in their hands.
So while she has concerns about large queues for tickets for major acts, Gannon does say it would be nice if a portion of tickets continued to be kept only for physical sales.
“Because there is something lovely about queuing for tickets. When I did get those Oasis tickets, coming home there was a real Willy Wonka feel to it, because they were so precious.”
And as Emer McLysaght points out, fans are facing huge costs in the quest to get tickets in today’s market.
“I’m a firm believer in ‘if you want a ticket badly enough, you’ll get one’. Unfortunately that increasingly means having to pay way over the face value of the ticket, but I have hunted down face value ‘gold dust’ tickets dozens of times over the years,” she says.
“It takes a lot of work and scouring the internet and sometimes comes down to the wire. The one show I’m not even going to bother trying for though is Chappell Roan in The Olympia. Currently there’s one ticket for sale on a resale site for €1100. She’s good, but she’s not that good.”
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say