Okay. So, we didn’t get tickets,” says Simone Khambatta, a digital creator from Mumbai. The tickets she was referring to were for Coldplay’s Music Of The Spheres World Tour concert happening in Mumbai on January 2025, and according to her, she wasn’t able to secure them even ‘after sitting in the same spot’ for three hours with five devices.
“I was on BookMyShow from 11.45 am with two devices, while my husband had three. All my friends were trying too. But the strange thing is, before the tickets were officially sold out on BookMyShow, Viagogo [the ticket re-selling platform] was already selling them at five times the price. How did they manage to get thousands of tickets and sell them at such ridiculous prices?” she shared on Instagram.
When BookMyShow announced on September 20 that the band would be returning to India after nine years, many of us were ecstatic. For some, it was a chance to redeem themselves after missing out on tickets for Diljit Dosanjh’s tour, which was sold out in minutes on Zomato.
However, anyone hoping to get Coldplay tickets knew it wasn’t going to be easy. Experience and social media chatter have taught them that tickets could vanish within moments. Like Simone, 1.3 crore Indians flocked to BookMyShow, crashing the platform and further raising two major questions that have since taken over social media.
- Firstly, how did resellers manage to snag hundreds of tickets and resell them (if it is legal, in the first place) at massively inflated prices within just minutes?
- Second, why the Monopoly in handling ticket sales?
Is reselling really illegal in India?
Let’s start from the very beginning.
Reselling websites were already under fire and facing public scrutiny after tickets for Diljit’s concert sold out within minutes, only to reappear on resale sites like Viagogo and Gigsberg at three times the price. Indian platforms such as TicketTransfer and TakemyTickets also had listings, with some tickets now going for as much as Rs 40,000.
Days later, when the same situation occurred with Coldplay, public outrage grew exponentially, especially on BookMyShow, where the tickets were sold on a ‘first come, first served basis’. However, according to people sharing their experiences on social media, the ‘queue’ wasn’t the same for everyone, as two people logging in at the same time were given very different queue numbers.
