Fifteen years after their explosive cut up, British music legends Liam and Noel Gallagher are reuniting for an Oasis tour that guarantees not solely Britpop nostalgia but additionally staggering revenues.
While Liam has insisted that cash is “way down the list” of causes for the feuding brothers’ reunion, British press studies have prompt that every sibling may pocket round £50 million ($67 million).
Matt Grimes, a music trade knowledgeable at Birmingham City University, supplied a barely extra conservative estimate of round £40 million per Gallagher for the 17 UK dates alone.
Oasis, whose hits embrace “Wonderwall”, “Don’t Look Back in Anger” and “Champagne Supernova”, kick off the reunion tour on July 4 in Cardiff earlier than enjoying a number of dates of their dwelling metropolis of Manchester the next week.
Almost 1.4 million tickets have been bought for the UK reveals, producing an estimated £240 million, in response to Barclays financial institution.
And that is only the start.
Merchandise gross sales, from T-shirts and puzzles to child garments and tableware, plus six pop-up outlets throughout the UK and Ireland may push complete income to round £400 million, Grimes stated.
The 24 concert events exterior the UK, together with in Buenos Aires, Chicago, Sydney, Tokyo and Toronto, will drive revenues even increased.
Still, the cash from the return of Oasis is dwarfed by Taylor Swift’s record-breaking Eras Tour, which grossed $2.2 billion from ticket gross sales alone throughout 149 reveals worldwide.
It was “a much bigger logistical event or sets of events than Oasis are proposing”, Grimes stated.
There was a chaotic scramble for prized Oasis tickets after they went on sale in August final yr.
But followers had been left outraged by exorbitant ticket prices that noticed sudden worth hikes — referred to as dynamic pricing — primarily based on overwhelming demand, in some instances from £150 to £350.
Ticketmaster, one of many official gross sales web sites, stated the pricing choice was made by the “tour organizer”.
Oasis pointed the finger at their promoter.
The Gallagher brothers’ promotional plan, nonetheless, was minimal: two posts on social media — one to tease, the opposite to substantiate.
“The fact that they announced a reunion after many, many years of ‘will they, won’t they’ is enough to make the press interested,” Chris Anderton, professor of cultural economics on the University of Southampton, instructed AFP.
For Oasis there is no new album to advertise, simply classics to revive.
“In the 1970s, even maybe the 1980s, you went on tour to sell albums,” Anderton stated.
“Now you go on tour to make money and the album is something on the side — if you make one at all.”
“Definitely Maybe”, launched 30 years in the past, climbed again to the highest of UK gross sales charts on the again of the reunion tour announcement.
Each Oasis concertgoer will spend a mean of £766 on tickets and outgoings equivalent to transport and lodging, in response to Barclays.
That is ready to inject £1 billion into the British economic system.
Two key shifts assist clarify the rise of mega-tours, stated Cecile Rap-Veber, managing director on the French artists’ rights group Sacem.
On one hand, streaming “doesn’t bring in as much money as the CD era”, prompting artists to take a look at how you can earn a living elsewhere, she stated.
On the opposite, “the public’s appetite for live shows” surged after the lockdown years of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Those components make followers extra keen to spend huge.
Grimes sums up the selection: “Do I go to… Spain or maybe the south of France for a week’s holiday that’s going to cost me £600? Or do I go and see my favorite band?”
© 2025 AFP