When tickets for two Coldplay concerts in Mumbaishowtime, India, went on sale last month, about 13 million people visited an online ticketing platform to vie for around 90,000 seats. Within minutes, the show was sold out and the platform had crashed, only for the tickets to later be offered on other sites at steeply marked-up prices.
In a country of 1.4 billion people, it is not unusual for demand to far outstrip supply for many things, from government jobs to public services. And as music fans in many places around the world are painfully aware, tickets to shows by popular artists can sell out in seconds.
But what doesn’t usually happen is a rush to judgment on social media that something nefarious must be going on — and even a call to the police to lodge a complaint.
In this case, even though Coldplay added another concert date and BookMyShow, the online platform selling the tickets, imposed a cap of four tickets per customer to avoid bulk buying, the police in Mumbai have questioned a senior BookMyShow official and twice summoned another high-ranking representative about the episode.
There is no evidence of wrongdoing by the company, and BookMyShow officials said the website and app had malfunctioned and crashed because so many people had tried logging on at the same time. The company said on X that “scalping and black marketing of tickets was against Indian law,” and a BookMyShow official said in a statement that “any tickets bought from unauthorized sources will be at their own risk and may likely be invalid or fake tickets.”
What is clear is that some can’t believe their bad luck.
“I was frustrated and angry,” said Ishan Agarwal, an engineering student in Delhi who, despite logging in from his laptop, two phones and an iPad, failed to get a ticket.
We are having trouble retrieving the article content.
Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber? Log in.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.showtime