Amid website crashes and long queues, Coldplay fans battle it out for tickets

There was no escape on social media from the influx of screenshots of long queue numbers everyone was sharing. While some said they got the tickets due to sheer luck, some expressed disappointment in booking platform BookMyShow.

After the first two shows were sold out in no time, a third show was announced for January 21. (Photo: X/ Coldplay)

5 min readPuneSep 22, 2024 09:26 PM IST First published on: Sep 22, 2024 at 09:26 PM IST

Sunday, September 22, will be long remembered by Coldplay fans for the intense battle it became to buy tickets for the band’s concert, returning to India after nine years. There was no escape on social media from the influx of screenshots of long queue numbers everyone was sharing. While some said they got the tickets due to sheer luck, some expressed disappointment in the booking platform after the site crashed.

‘Coldplay: Music of Spheres of the World’ concerts are scheduled on January 18 and 19, 2025, at the DY Patil Stadium, Navi Mumbai. After the first two shows were sold out in no time, a third show was announced for January 21. “Due to phenomenal demand, a third Mumbai date has been added at DY Patil Stadium for 21 January, 2025. Tickets on sale at 2 PM IST today,” the band tweeted from its official handle. The ticket prices for the concert ranged from Rs 2,500 to Rs 35,000.

Chandni Rauniyar, who was trying to book tickets with friends and family, said, “We got to know about the third show at 1:33 pm. My brother and boyfriend went to the website and were there in the waiting room. I joined after them, however, when we were assigned the queue info, I was way ahead of them even though they had been waiting before me. BookMyShow did not assign the queue number in the way people came on the website, it was random or something. Even when we were booking tickets for the first show, we were ready from 11.30 am and till 12.10 pm, we could only see ‘coming soon’ on the screen, while another friend of mine already got the option of ‘book now’ and was in the queue.”

A note on BookMyShow said, “You may be placed in the ticket queue due to heavy traffic. Each time and date has its individual queue dependent on the queue traffic.”

Anisha, one of those who got her hands on the tickets, shared how they managed to get the tickets. She said, “We were four people between Delhi and Bombay on a conference call trying to open the BookMyShow page and it logged all of us out minutes before the sale went live. Then the site crashed. By 12.05 pm, none of us had been able to make it to the ‘queue’ stage and we thought they must be sold out already because five minutes is a long time for something like this. Then out of nowhere, I was assigned a queue number which said 4384. Meanwhile, others on the call got in one by one, someone was at 1 lakh, another at 4 lakh. For the next 20 minutes, my number didn’t budge either. After that it started falling fast, I think BookMyShow took some time to fix things on their backend and I was able to get four tickets by 1 pm. I’d been logged in and refreshing the page since 11.55 am. People on the call literally muted themselves to not make any noise while I entered delivery details, etc because there was so much pressure.”

Sharing his experience of booking the tickets, Tanmay Jain, said, “I was at my friend’s house and the two of us had six devices and started saving the addresses and payment modes and just as we refreshed, the site and app crashed and when we logged back in, we were behind almost two lakh people in queue. After the third show was announced on 21st Jan, the queue got outnumbered and the screen just showed ‘your number in queue 999999+’.”

Talking about the hype of the concert, Sumeet Jadhav, an artist manager, said, “After Ed Sheeran, Lollapalooza India and many private bookings at Ambani weddings have brought India into the forefront of the LIVE music events ecosystem. Every international artist wants to tour India now and it’s such a good time to live in. They know there’s a market here and it shows with concert tickets getting sold out in mere minutes. Coldplay was always popular in India, thanks to the Global Citizen Festival that happened in 2016, but the recent hype has been because of the experiences the band created, especially with Xylobands which are wrist light bands that glow in sync with the songs together in the entire concerts plus the state of the art production that Coldplay brings. It creates such beautiful and mesmerising memories that I doubt no one wants to miss it. Coldplay’s songs are definitely popular but it’s more of experiential hype. The experience you get in this concert is a once in a lifetime opportunity.”