'Why are you sweating?': Pure hell in the Oasis ticket queues.

Twenty-seven minutes, nine cancelled transactions and a single Oasis ticket: the Ticketmaster queue to top all Ticketmaster queues.

Wallets lay open. An array of credit cards were scattered around the desk in front of me, most of them useless. Laptops and tablets sat askew, multiple cellphones unlocked, all with browsers, banking apps, and messaging services pinging randomly.

The countdown timer continued to tick, threatening to cancel my order completely. It did this once; then, just for fun, it did it again. Ticketmaster wouldn’t accept my credit card, my debit card, or any of my wife’s cards either.

Why? WHY?

It was at this moment that my wife walked into the room, observed my disheveled state and asked: “Why are you sweating?”

As the afternoon sun shone brightly through the windows, and as my dog snored softly by my feet, I spent 30 minutes inside a sick circle of hell, one surely only Satan himself could have designed.

Yes, I braved the Oasis Ticketmaster queues. And I won.

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How hard could it be? This was a thought I had at 3.30pm as I logged into my Ticketmaster account, changed my location to Australia, then stared into the mean eyes of Liam and Noel Gallagher as the clock ticked down to 4pm, the time tickets to four Oasis shows in Melbourne and Sydney would go on sale.

It had, up until this point, been so polite, so gentle, so easy. The previous week, I’d entered a ballot. A few days later, I was informed I’d succeeded with my ballot entry, winning the right to attempt to purchase tickets to an Oasis show.

It’s a ridiculous process but it seemed smooth, effortless, even. I was in. But this was just the first of many doors that needed unlocking. I was about to enter a labyrinth full of trap doors, wonky staircases, and dodgy paths. I needed maps and keys. Escape might be impossible. The prize would be elusive.

At 4pm, as the countdown ended, I felt smug. Then my Ticketmaster screen froze. It sat there, saying “<1 MIN”, a countdown clock that seemed broken, one that threatened to go into the negatives, or, possibly, like that cursed Linkin Park timer, to start going back up again.

Soon, it changed again, allowing me to pass through another digital door. It said: “Welcome to the waiting room.” The Ticketmaster waiting room is not a good place. This is a cursed place, a scorched wasteland full of souls sitting there staring angrily at their screens, just like I was.

At 4.01pm, Ticketmaster confirmed there were 1927 people ahead of me in the wretched waiting room.

At 4.02pm, there were 1632 people ahead of me.

At 4.03pm, there were 1527 people ahead of me.

At 4.04pm, there were 1152 people ahead of me.

I sat there, wishing death upon them all. Or worse.

Here are some question I pondered as I sat in that queue: Is 1632 people a lot of people to wish unpleasantness upon? Can I even book flights and accommodation to attend a show that’s more than a year away? Could I risk getting another cookie? Is my dog … farting?

At 4.05pm, there were 857 people ahead of me.

At 4.06pm there were 752 people ahead of me.

Then the queue sped up: 302 people; then 82 people; then down to one, a single soul that needed to be dispatched in a nasty way before I could spend many hundreds of dollars to buy a single magical ticket. Soon, I would pass through another digital door that would allow me to select my seat and spend I lot of money I wasn’t sure I wanted to spend.

Little did I know, my troubles were just beginning.

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Strategically, I’d chosen to buy a ticket for the very last show of the Oasis tour, at Sydney’s Accor Stadium on November 8. This, I thought, would be the show with the least amount of demand. The chances of Noel and Liam Gallagher making it this far on their comeback tour seem slight. I was willing to take my chances.

I was right. Through to the ticketing page, I browsed a selection of stadium seats. Every section was available in a stadium that seemed impossibly huge, the scale unimaginable when compared to anything available anywhere in Aotearoa.

The vast expanse of Accor Stadium.

I selected one GA ticket, inputted my details, and clicked on the button to pay for it. Gears whirred. Machines whined. Rejected. This time it was my fault: I’d incorrectly inputted my location as Australia. So I returned, corrected my mistake, and admitted my real location: Aotearoa. Rejected. Again.

This is when the system really started to break down. I tried credit card after credit card. Ticketmaster wouldn’t accept any of them. I tripled checked the numbers, and the codes making my phone ping. It took so long I got kicked out of the system and had to queue again. Then it happened again. I tried every credit card available to me so many times Ticketmaster banned them from being used.

I got rejected nine times. So I sat there, a sweaty infuriated mess. Frustrated, exhausted, infuriated, I gave up. It was 4.25pm. Ticketmaster had beaten me.

Then I remembered something: I had another credit card sitting in a drawer, one that didn’t get used anymore. But it might still be active. I dug through that drawer, pulled it out, plugged in the details and … it worked. Yesterday, at 4.27pm, I spent $353.28 on a single floor ticket for an Oasis show in Australia.

I beat the system. I clocked the game.

I won.

At least, I think I did.

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I did all this because going to Australia to see our favourite artists is rapidly becoming the reality for many Aotearoa music fans. As I’ve covered relentlessly here in this newsletter, The Weeknd, Kylie Minogue, Katy Perry, Billie Eilish, Green Day, The Killers, Oasis and Olivia Rodrigo are all touring Australia, but they’re not coming here.

So, sitting in huge Australian Ticketmaster queues is what we’re all doing if we want to see any of these shows for ourselves. I wanted to experience this. I wanted to know what it was really like. I don’t yet know if I can afford the flights and accommodation. I’ll think about that next year. So I guess I got exactly what I deserved.

Yesterday, something else happened: I spoke to Stuff.co.nz about this exact topic, and they got new and interesting details out of key players in the industry.

This is what Rhythm and Alps festival general manager Harry Gorringe had to say:

"It's boring, but there is a recession in play. If you're an agent, or management, sitting in the UK or in LA, their entire job is to make money [...] When our dollar is so weak against the pound and the USD, it takes a lot of grunt for us to get something in front of them that's gonna move the needle … The numbers that Australia can get per concert, we can't do that. We just physically can't. We don't have the venues.”

And here’s what Live Nation New Zealand managing director Mark Kneebone said:

“It has been an unprecedented year for stadium touring in our part of the world. We’ve seen a record year for stadium shows in 2024 including three shows across Auckland and Dunedin with P!nk, and we’re preparing to host one night at Eden Park with Travis Scott, two nights at Mt Smart Stadium with Pearl Jam and three nights with Coldplay at Eden Park.”

Agreed. It has been a good year. My concern, though, is what’s coming next along that concert pipeline. By the time Coldplay’s three Eden Park shows end in November, we have only Luke Combs locked in for stadium shows across summer. More and more acts seem to be bypassing us, and I’m worried that troubling trend is going to continue, then get set in stone.

Right now, the only way to see the world’s biggest acts is to travel. It sucks, it’s brutally expensive, only the rich can afford to do it, and as my experience yesterday proved, it’s incredibly stressful.

So, am I happy I had this experience, that I put all this effort into getting a single Oasis ticket?

Don’t do it.

You said you wouldn’t do it, Chris.

Ahh fuck it.

Definitely maybe.

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