Coldplay fans upset over ticket booking experience

Many fans of British band Coldplay in Bengaluru are complaining they haven’t been able to buy tickets despite their best efforts.

Coldplay is performing in Mumbai on January 18, 19 and 21, 2025. The band, returning to India after eight years, added the third show in response to high demand. Rumours of a fourth show in Ahmedabad have been doing the rounds.

Tickets went on sale online on September 22 at 12 noon, and complaints soon started pouring in about long virtual queues and black marketing. Many fans were planning a trip to Mumbai to catch the show.

Shivani Vijay, whose queue number was 387, was able to get four tickets. “At first, it was announced that each user would be able to book eight tickets. But later, we found out it was just four each,” she says. For her, the experience was “extremely haphazard”. Of her 30 friends and family trying to buy tickets, only 12 were able to. They include her brother, sister and partner. “We wanted to go together but now, we have to attend the concerts separately,” she says. 

Steep resale rates

Some believe tickets were bought in bulk for resale at inflated rates. This is being done with the help of veiled posts on social media, with ticket holders saying they are not in a position to attend the show. 

Shwetha C (name changed), a 20-year-old college student, was at number 32,000 in the virtual queue. Then, the website crashed. She found a reseller via X, who sold her tickets originally priced at Rs 18,000 for Rs 32,000. “He was initially quoting Rs 58,000, but I was able to negotiate and bring it down,” she explains. She plans to attend the gig with her brother and father.  

The black marketing has left fans livid, as also reports that ‘fake tickets’ are being sold. Omkar Ajagunde is not a Coldplay fan, but his friends were going to Mumbai, and so he wanted to catch the concert with them. “We were trying to book tickets with eight or nine devices. On one of the devices, the queue number was 18,000 so we were hopeful. It finally came down to 14,000, then 10,000, 8,000 and 1,100. At 1,100 I was stuck for 10 minutes,” he recalls. He finally bought four tickets for Rs 6,500 each. He has since been approached by many offering to buy the tickets at a premium. “But I have no intention of reselling them,” he says.

Other fans like Mark Ashish, a 25-year-old IT consultant, waited in the virtual queue for close to an hour, and then gave up. 

Ankit Agrawal, a 33-year-old event planner, bought two Rs 7,500 tickets. Bands these days charge a percentage of the sales, and not a fixed sum. This makes a huge difference to the way the price is determined, he says.

Unfair trade practice

Reselling of tickets at inflated prices is common, especially when it comes to high profile sporting events like the FIFA World Cup and IPL, but it is an unfair trade practice, says advocate Indra Dhanush.

“If it can be proven that the tickets were bought in bulk for reselling at inflated prices by colluding with the hosts and others, you can lodge a complaint,” he explains. The police can also take suo moto action. 

This was inevitable in a country like India with the kind of numbers we have, says Oum Pradutt, who runs an event management company in Bengaluru. “This is common even with ticket booking websites in the West,” he says. The reselling of tickets in black is unacceptable, he says.

On Tuesday, ticket booking site Bookmyshow put out a statement on X that it had filed a complaint against the sale of fake tickets.

The post also warned followers against buying tickets from ticket resale platforms, where tickets are available for Rs 15,000 to Rs 2.78 lakh. The tickets were originally priced between Rs 2,500 and Rs 35,000.