Buy at ₹12K, sell at ₹300K: How Coldplay tickets beat crypto on Sunday

On Sunday (September 22) afternoon, the equivalent of half of Australia’s population logged into ticket booking site BookMyShow. It did so with a prayer on its lips for tickets to British band Coldplay’s Mumbai gigs scheduled for January next year. Only 1.5 lakh tickets were available and they were gone in 30 minutes. Fans who managed to get tickets were ecstatic but the vast majority logged out feeling not only dejected but also frustrated and cheated. Hashtag #soldplay trended on X. If you were part of the other 99% of India’s population that managed to have Sunday lunch in peace, unaware of and unconcerned by this storm, here’s what happened. Coldplay who?As said above, they are a British band, and considering that they came together in 1996, they are not exactly the spring chickens of the music industry. Frontman Chris Martin is well-known in India, although he does not consider himself cool. Famous words: “I’ve never been cool and I don’t really care about being cool. It’s just an awful lot of time and hair gel wasted.” Yet, he was Mr Gwyneth Paltrow for 10 years. Since the marriage didn’t last, Martin’s fame currently rests on his band’s 34 Grammy nominations and 7 wins, underpinned by songs like Viva La Vida, Paradise, A Sky Full of Stars, and Hymn for the Weekend. The last one is a good song, no doubt, but has been listed here on purpose. It was shot in Mumbai, the video taking off from Vasai Fort. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YykjpeuMNEkComing to IndiaThe band last performed in India, rather Mumbai, in November 2016, when the 99% were busy standing in ATM queues 11 days after ‘demonetisation’. So, fans have already waited eight years for this opportunity to see Coldplay live. The January visit to Mumbai will be part of their ‘Music of the Spheres World Tour’ that has been on since March 2022 and will end at Wembley, London, on August 31 next year. Coldplay had originally scheduled only two gigs at Navi Mumbai’s DY Patil stadium, on January 18 and 19, a weekend. They had clearly underestimated their fan base because when both shows sold out in minutes, they had to add one more for Tuesday, January 21. It’s a sobering thought that Melbourbe and Sydney in Australia got four shows each. So did Seoul. But since Hong Kong also got three, it’s alright. Ticket, ticketTicket sales for the Coldplay shows were to start at 12 noon on September 22, but many fans complained they weren’t available for booking until after 12.15pm. The Times of India reported: “1.3 crore people logged in to buy tickets. Just 1.5 lakh tickets were up for grabs.” What were the odds then?Marketing professional Tina Gurnaney actually tried doing the math three days in advance and arrived at a highly optimistic “1 in 4.4” probability. But she had based her calculation on just about 2 lakh fans queuing up. Odds of getting a Coldplay concert ticket pic.twitter.com/E85kAmf3rG

— Tina Gurnaney (@TinaGurnaney) September 19, 2024 With 1.3 crore seekers, everyone’s calculations fell apart. The DY Patil stadium has space for 50,000. Two scheduled gigs meant only 1 lakh tickets were available at first, so fans were bound to have a harrowing time. The rush even made the BookMyShow site crash briefly. “Many ticket seekers kept refreshing their screens hoping to get that precious thing. Some received notifications that tickets for the concerts on January 18 and 19 were sold out in 30 minutes,” TOI said. According to the paper, Pune-based musician Imaad Saraf was among the dejected multitude: “My whole family was trying to buy the tickets at the dot of noon but the notification read ‘there are not enough tickets in the inventory’ on the portal.”BookMyShow said it faced very heavy traffic, so the queue or wait list kept growing longer for users. According to its data, the queue increased to 842,745 at 1.39 pm. However, many users later shared screenshots showing they were queued up behind over a million others. Worldwide it's a #ColdPlay show... But in #India it's #SoldPlay show... #ColdplayIndia #ColdplayMumbai pic.twitter.com/bAJW2wLU2Z

— Shishupal Kadam (@shishupal_kadam) September 22, 2024 Claims by some tech wizards that they had exploited a feature of the BookMyShow site to get tickets before the official sale started didn’t go down well either. Hindustan Times explained the website might have “loaded the ‘Buy Ticket’ URL in the background (in code), but it wasn’t yet visible or clickable on the webpage. By using the ‘Inspect Element’ tool, someone could view the hidden parts of the webpage’s code and locate the URL for purchasing tickets.” As if to make amends, at 1.30pm BookMyShow announced that Coldplay would perform a bonus gig on January 21, but tickets to that also sold out almost immediately.Outrage after heartacheIndian fans can live with failure. After all, they have grown up seeing train tickets vanish from the IRCTC website before their eyes, but the thought of being cheated out of ‘Paradise’ was too much. As tickets started appearing for resale on other websites, at exorbitant rates, the outrage grew.On BookMyShow, tickets to the shows were priced between ₹2,000 and ₹35,000. But on reseller sites like viagogo, the same tickets were available for many times more. “A ₹12,500 ticket was being sold for over ₹3.36 lakh on these platforms, with standing tickets, originally priced at ₹6,450, being resold for up to ₹50,000,” The Economic Times reported. On Monday afternoon, TOI+ found single tickets starting at around ₹38,000 on viagogo, and quickly moving up into six digits. Later in the day, though, the starting price had cooled to around ₹35,000. More than 1,100 tickets were listed for resale for the three days. ‘Not genuine’BookMyShow has said tickets available on reseller sites are fake, and people shouldn’t buy them. “Protect Yourself from Ticket Scams! Don’t fall prey to unauthorised platforms selling fake tickets for Coldplay’s Music Of The Spheres World Tour 2025 in India!” it said on its social media handles, adding, “Ticket scalping is illegal in India and punishable by law. Please don’t fall prey to this because you will be buying fake tickets.”However, when CNBCTV18 asked BookMyShow how it would identify genuine ticket buyers at the concerts, it did not get a response.