The British band Coldplay’s “Music of the Spheres World Tour 2025” is scheduled to come to India at Mumbai’s DY Patil Stadium on the 18th, 19th, and 21st of January 2025. Indian fans went gaga over the band coming to Mumbai, as everyone sat transfixed on their laptops and phones nervously on September 22, well before 12 PM, when the tickets were to go live on BookMyShow. To the despair of fans across the country, Coldplay’s tickets sold out within minutes of the tickets going live. While some had to wait in a seemingly never-ending digital queue before getting their hands on a ticket, others still could not get a ticket even after waiting in the queue.
While BookMyShow was Coldplay’s exclusive ticketing partner for their concert in Mumbai, secondary marketplaces such as Viagogo had Coldplay tickets listed on their website for ludicrously exorbitant prices, while BookMyShow displayed a “Sold Out” message to fans eager to purchase tickets. While the official prices for one ticket varied between Rs. 2000 and Rs. 35,000, sites like Viagogo priced one ticket as high as a whopping Rs. 3.36 lakh.
Users flooded social media platforms with grievances and angry retorts, many accusing BookMyShow of complicity in the black marketing of tickets. Aside from organized secondary marketplaces like Viagogo, which black-marketed tickets on a large scale, common people too partook in ticket scalping by selling their extra tickets via WhatsApp groups and Instagram stories at exponentially high prices. They had no qualms in pricing a ticket they bought for Rs. 9,500 for ten times its price at Rs. 95,000.
Advocate Amit Vyas filed a complaint accusing the ticketing platform BookMyShow of black marketing the concert tickets, based on whose complaint a probe was initiated by the Mumbai police. However, BookMyShow condemned ticket scalping and warned fans from falling prey to scams selling tickets through unauthorized websites. BookMyShow has filed a complaint over the issue and assured its support during the course of the investigation.
Based on Vyas’s complaint, the Economic Offences Wing (EOW) summoned BookMyShow’s CEO and co-founder Ashish Hemrajani and its technical head for questioning on the matter on Saturday. Now, the EOW has issued a fresh summons to Hemrajani to appear before an investigating officer today.
BookMyShow claims that it had taken all the necessary measures to ensure that genuine fans got a chance to purchase tickets by limiting the number of tickets that could be bought at once to four. However, it is dubious why BookMyShow restricted its measures to limiting the number of tickets that could be purchased at once to four when a relatively straightforward and fool-proof solution to ticket scalping is widely used by several event organizers already. Could BookMyShow not have asked buyers for proof of personal identification so that linking a government ID to the ticket would ensure that only the person in whose name the ticket is issued would be allowed to enter? Why could the tickets not be non-transferable? These are questions looming large on BookMyShow’s innocence.
