Debate contribution: Dynamic Pricing

Debate contribution by Mr Matthew O'Toole on 16 September 2024.

MLA

Mr Matthew O'Toole

Party at the time

Social Democratic and Labour Party

Date

16 September 2024

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Private Members' Business

Heading

Dynamic Pricing

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4532706

Read the official Assembly record

Text

A good few of my music puns have been taken away, but I will have to 'Roll With It'

I will make do. Obviously, we will support the motion. I, along with many hundreds of thousands — millions — of other geriatric millennials and Gen X people, attempted to get Oasis tickets a few weeks ago. I was one of the people who, while doing childcare not very well — I was neither doing the childcare very well nor securing tickets very well — was pathetically refreshing the screen on the Ticketmaster website, to be told that I was number gazillion in the queue. I did not even get to the point of being quoted some extortionate sum of money. I was number 400,000 or something — it was not 400,000, but whatever it was — while my other geriatric millennial dad friends and I were trying in our WhatsApp group to figure out whether there was any chance of getting to Dublin, whether Oasis would announce a second concert or whether we could go to London. I give that naff little anecdote to show that, clearly, lots of people experienced that issue and lots of our constituents were frustrated by it. I want to touch on something that Sian Mulholland said. She has real professional experience in this area. Part of the reason why there is such a huge and disproportionate commercial emphasis on artists' live mega concerts and the extraordinary cost of them is that recorded music has effectively become so poorly paid and valueless because of digitisation, the internet and everything else. There is a huge and disproportionate burden on raising revenue and making money from concerts. That means that ordinary, working people are faced with completely unacceptable, extraordinary costs, which is particularly sad, given that Oasis is proudly a working-class band and that many of its fans are ordinary, working people who are now faced with the appalling situation of going to the end of the queue and getting an extraordinary and grotesque number. People have talked about the laws of market economics. I will not get into economic theory one way or the other, but, obviously, there is no such thing as a perfectly free market. It is also true to say, however, that, when it comes to the laws of supply and demand and a ticket to see a band that has not played in a long time — there is no other Oasis; they have not played together in 15 years, and theirs is a particular product with a very particular value — the inherent value is based on the connection that fans have with that band. That is why the current situation is so grotesque and frustrating for ordinary people. We also need to think about the pipeline of new talent. If we do not support grassroots music and working people cannot afford to go to concerts, those people will not pick up a guitar or start to learn the keyboard and will not create live music in the future. The other factor in that is the funding of the arts here, which is abysmal. We would have liked to see in the Programme for Government an aspiration to increase our per capita arts funding, which is extraordinarily poor, including for the live music scene. We support the broad thrust of the motion, although 'Some Might Say' that it could and, perhaps, should have called specifically on the Minister responsible, who is the Minister for the Economy, to do something about it. It mentions the Consumer Council, which is an arm's-length body of the Department for the Economy, and the Competition and Markets Authority, which is the regulatory authority in London. I hope that, when the reports come back, the Minister for the Economy will be ready to produce 'The Masterplan' — that is for Members who are into Oasis B-sides — for how to deal with the challenge. We attempted to amend the motion to say that. It is a serious issue, and we cannot simply pass motions asking for other bodies to do things without fronting up and dealing with it, where our Ministers and Departments have responsibilities. It is true to say that, given that none of the Oasis concerts will be in Northern Ireland, there is a limited amount that the Minister in question could have done. Ultimately, however, I would like to hear what the Department and the Minister intend to do. 'Don't Look Back in Anger' will be my approach to that, Mr Deputy Speaker. I hope that, when we finally get recommendations from the Competition and Markets Authority, there is a proactive plan to deal with this. I also hope that we are serious and ambitious about properly supporting live music venues and grassroots music, because, as Sian Mulholland rightly said, you cannot, for ever and a day, separate huge mega concerts and internationally renowned artists from the grassroots music scene; at some point, once that relationship breaks down, there will not be a pipeline. If you make it impossible for ordinary, working people and young people to go to those gigs, you will make it impossible to maintain that healthy pipeline.

867 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

Not flagged

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Assessed 21 October 2026 at 11:03 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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