Oasis, Mozart, and the Beautiful Deal

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A few weeks ago, after waiting online for several hours (and offline for fifteen years), fans of Oasis were shocked to find tickets to the band’s reunion tour selling for more than double the advertised price. Ready to bite the $262 bullet, fans found themselves staring down the barrel of a $688 cannon.

Surge pricing (or dynamic pricing) is nothing new; it’s how we buy houses, pay for Ubers, trade stocks. It’s barely new to music, really, as secondary marketplaces like viagogo and Stubhub have existed for years. In this instance, surge pricing simply captured for Oasis what scalpers would have stolen anyway. So why the anger??

Not warning fans about their use of the mechanism was undoubtedly gross; this certainly pressured people into making financial decisions for which they were unprepared. Even so, a well-publicised, forewarned use of the mechanism still would have drawn criticism. Even for a group as cocky as Oasis, there’s just something about pitting fans against each other for one’s tickets / affections that feels off… transgressive, even.?

The temptation is to moralise or to feel our way through Oasis and other acts’ adoption of surge pricing: we might say they’ve sullied the stage or, as in Bruce Springsteen’s case, they have betrayed the working-class ideologies for which they became famous. We should be wary, though, of proceeding too far with such arguments as they are ultimately arguments for the maintenance of our current situation, an economic model that has led to the gradual asphyxiation of popular music and culture writ-large.?

I understand that nobody enjoys spending $688 - but, when it comes to talking about music and money, to drawing a line between art and commerce, I think our instincts are wrong.?

If Mozart were alive - and with me on the train this morning - he’d think it strange that I was listening to his Requiem. For starters, it’s pretty morbid. When listening to this composition, you shouldn't be on the Pakenham line; you should be on a pew in Vienna, mourning the death of Anna von Walsegg and offering a smallpox-infested hanky to her husband, Count Franz, who commissioned this piece for this very specific event. In such a light, this, the first performance of the greatest achievement in musical and/or human history, is just one half of a pretty basic transaction - or the resolution of a debt.?

“Hey, Wolfgang. My wife’s funeral is this December. Can you DJ?”

“For sure. RIP btw.”

Despite the depth of our love for certain artworks, for anything’s supposedly transcendental qualities, no composition lives outside of its economic context - and that’s okay. There’s no reason the commercial structures underpinning the creation and distribution of a piece couldn’t deepen our relationship to it. Hell, the transaction itself could be beautiful.

No one really knows when this happened - but, sometime after Mozart’s death (most probably the 19th Century), the Austrian government purchased his Requiem. Across centuries and throughout both technological and geopolitical revolutions, the Requiem was transformed - from a published set of sheet music, into concerts, then recordings, vinyls, broadcasts, albums, CDs, digitised pieces, YouTube videos, and Spotify tracks. Every time obscurity threatened to swallow it whole, the Requiem was repackaged and reshaped - but always with permission of the creator’s countrymen - the work’s business updated so the art’s beauty might survive, might thrive in the hearts of new audiences long into the future.

Our desire to separate artists from their work and their work from its price, when combined with the iron-fisted immediacy of platforms like Spotify, has blinded us to the potential of the transaction in culture and our potential to become more than just consumers of its products.?

I can’t afford to commission a treadmill mix from Oasis - but what of my favourite local artist? Could me and 249 of their fans around the world commission a piece - or their next album? And what sort of music would we ask them to make - for us all to own? Something catchy? Something popular? Or something incontrovertible, something our country might one day buy? Something worthy of its place on the servers, of the power and the memory required to beat back the biting threat of oblivion. Something with which you can look at this life and see it for what is: morbid, confusing, and expensive - but a good deal.?