Viagogo and other ticket resale rivals stand to make millions from Oasis fans (2024)

The excitement generated by the reunion of Oasis rippled instantly this week from the Gallagher brothers’ native Manchester to a sleek office block in Geneva situated above a supermarket and perfume shop on the banks of the Rhone.

The aptly-named Rue du Commerce in Switzerland’s monied financial capital is home to the European headquarters of Viagogo, a ticket reselling website which – along with its competitors – is likely to profit handsomely from sky-high demand for the 17-date Oasis tour due to start in Cardiff next July.

Indeed, such was apparent anticipation of demand that Viagogo – widely seen as the leader in a UK ticket reselling market conservatively estimated to be worth £350m a year – opened mailing lists this week (several days before official sales had begun) offering to alert customers when seats became available for the sought-after gigs.

Just how much additional revenue Viagogo – and rivals such as StubHub and GeekSeat – stand to generate from the epochal stampede to see Oasis live, which is due to start at 9am on Saturday when general online ticket sales open, is unclear. But one industry source told i that “tens of millions [of pounds]” is likely to be spent by fans who miss out on securing tickets through official routes and turn instead to the burgeoning reselling and exchange sector.

According to the calculations of one online gambling site, barely 3 per cent of the estimated body of 32 million potential Oasis ticket buyers worldwide are likely to get seats, leading to a potential windfall of cash – and controversy – for the “secondary market” sites.

There were bitter complaints from Taylor Swift fans last year when official tickets for the American megastar’s Eras tour were snapped up at record pace, only to then appear on reselling platforms at inflated prices within minutes of selling out. By the time of Swift’s first UK performance in June, tickets with a face value of three figures were being offered on the secondary market for more than £4,000 each.

There are long-standing concerns that many of the tickets for the most in-demand artists appearing on reselling sites are the result of the labours of professional touts who deploy software “bots” to secure places in online sales queues and make multiple purchases.

Viagogo has condemned what it described as “bad actors” exploiting the ticketing market. The website, whose holding company is based in the US state of Delaware, renowned for its financial secrecy, has pointed out that it provided information to a UK investigation which earlier this year led to the conviction of two Norfolk-based concert ticket touts for fraudulent trading after the pair made sales of £6.5m via reselling sites.

By any standards, the so-called secondary market for event tickets remains glitteringly lucrative.

The reselling platforms broadly operate by charging a fee or percentage commission to both sellers, who can set the price being asked for their tickets, and buyers. Viagogo does not publish a standard commission rate – nor indeed a figure for its revenues or profits – but is said to charge a total commission of about 25 per cent.

The result is some handsome earnings.

The North American arm of StubHub, which was split into two separate entities in 2021 after it was bought by Viagogo, recorded revenues of $1.4bn (£1.06bn) last year from both primary and secondary ticket sales. It is also widely rumoured to be lining up a stock market floatation which would see it valued at $16.5bn (£12.5bn). A separate company – StubHub International – operates in Europe and elsewhere, and is a competitor to Viagogo in those markets.

All of which, in an industry dedicated to live entertainment, will be music to the ears of Eric Baker, the California-born founder of both Viagogo and StubHub, and his senior lieutenants, among them Edward Parkinson, the Oxford University chemistry graduate who runs Viagogo’s UK operations.

Mr Baker, 51, who famously paid $4bn to regain control of StubHub in 2019 shortly before the live entertainment sector was devastated by the Covid-19 pandemic, once told an audience that his aim after leaving the prestigious Stanford Business School had been “just to make a lot of money”.

It is an aspiration at which it would seem he is increasingly successful. Despite his purchase of StubHub being described by one leading business journal as “the worst deal ever” after it appeared that the pandemic would wipe out concert promoters and ticket sellers alike, the live events sector has recovered strongly and is predicted to be worth $754bn (£573bn) a year by 2030.

As one industry source put it to i this week: “If the StubHub floatation goes ahead and reaches the valuation that has been circulated then, rather than being the worst deal ever, Eric will have engineered one of the best ever. You make your own luck in this game and he’s played his hand well.”

Mr Baker, who set up Viagogo in 2006 working from a flat in London’s Knightsbridge, and in 2020 owned no fewer than three mansions in Beverly Hills, also increasingly moves in influential circles. He was last month named among tech donors to the re-election campaign of Joe Biden who privately expressed concerns about Mr Biden’s dwindling chances against Donald Trump prior to the President’s decision to no longer stand in November.

Viagogo – and indeed its competitors – insist that far from being lynchpins in an ecosystem which inflates prices for fans, they are “bringing order” to what was hitherto a wild west of ticket reselling. With the exception of football matches, the reselling of live entertainment tickets is entirely legal in the UK and operators such as Viagogo say their systems of safeguards and guarantees – for example that sellers are only paid once an event has been successfully attended and buyers will be given alternative tickets where possible in the rare circ*mstance that entry is denied – offer consumers peace of mind.

Viagogo did not immediately respond to questions from i. But speaking earlier this year to Rolling Stone magazine, the company’s global managing director, Cris Miller, said: “Getting fans into live events is what we care about the most. The entire premise of our business is that you’re going to get what you paid for and see a great performance.”

Hitherto, the secondary ticketing sector has broadly had a successful track record in persuading the UK government that it is a force for good. In May, then Conservative business minister Kevin Hollinrake rejected calls from Labour to make regulatory changes including explicitly requiring reselling sites to state the original face value of tickets being sold, telling the House of Commons: “I have quite happily used Viagogo on many occasions, as other people have when reselling tickets.”

The sector now faces a battle to persuade the new Labour Government that it should not pursue its plans to impose a price cap on reselling markets amid suggestions that an intense lobbying campaign co-ordinated via the United States is being planned by the sector.

In the meantime, however, the scene is set for a weekend – and indeed many months – of febrile trading for the opportunity to revisit the glory days of Oasis.

One reselling operation in Germany was earlier this week found by i to be already offering tickets to see the Gallagher brothers before they had even gone on sale. When the website – Ticombo – was approached by this newspaper, it said that while it was confident the listings were legitimate, it would temporarily suspend them as a “precautionary measure”.