Oasis, one of the most iconic British rock bands of the 1990s, emerged from the heart of Manchester with a sound that defined a generation. Led by the Gallagher brothers, Liam and Noel, their raw energy, swagger, and anthemic tracks like Wonderwall and Don't Look Back in Anger propelled them to global stardom.
On the 27th August Oasis announced that they would reunite for a UK tour in 2025, which sent the British public into a frenzied rush to relive the heights of the 90s and experience their music live. However, as the tickets went on sale at 9am on the Ticketmaster website on Saturday 31st August, many fans found themselves to be part of large queues and victims of greatly inflated ticket prices driven up by the ‘dynamic pricing’ mechanic.
At Gener8 we thought it would be interesting to uncover behavioural insights behind this cultural moment.
Google Trends is universally known as one of the best ways to get a lens into the evolving intent landscape. When looking at Oasis-related search demand on Google in the UK, one can identify two demand spikes; one on August 27th when the reunion tour was announced and the other on August 31st when the tickets went on sale on Ticketmaster.
With Gener8’s vast clickstream panel, we were able to find an identical search intent trend to Google Trends for Oasis-related searches on Google.
However, with the ability to dive in much deeper with Gener8’s dataset and see individual search terms as they happened, we were able to uncover that on the day that the tickets went live a large percentage of overall Oasis-related searches were made with ‘sold out’ intent. Clearly fans started to panic whether or not they’d get tickets when they found themselves in long queues on Ticketmaster.
We thought it would also be interesting to go beyond search and look into Ticketmaster traffic itself. Filtering out visits to non-Oasis-related pages on Ticketmaster, we were able to identify a similar demand trend to Google search.
But the more interesting story was to be seen within the mix of landing pages visited on the day of tickets going on sale.
Clearly many people tried to get tickets to multiple event dates, queuing up to different location and date pages, shown by an average of 11.7 visits/ user on the day. We also found that the London tour locations were most in-demand based on site visits, closely followed up by Manchester which indexed especially highly as it will host the start of the band’s UK tour.
By looking at the demographics of Gener8 users who visited the Ticketmaster site on the day of ticket release, we were able to establish that Millennials indexed especially highly when compared to other generations. This would make sense, given that they would have grown up during the peak of the band’s popularity in the late 90s.
However, what was interesting to see was that Gen X were generally less interested in tickets than Gen Z, especially given that the former would have seen the band vs. many younger generations who wouldn’t have. Perhaps a big driver here was that the younger generations are more ‘experiences’ driven to see a favourite band that they were simply too young to see during their prime?
We utilised Gener8's Pageview and Demographic datasets to uncover behavioural insights behind Oasis & Ticketmaster. Gener8 Labs’ complete data and insights solution empowers media and marketing businesses to find actionable consumer and market insights, using our unique, consented, first party panel data sets that are all connected around one user ID.
Discover how you can power your decisions and gain a competitive edge from our behavioural truthset by contacting us today!
