“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.
Simone wasn’t the only one to experience this. In fact, a lot of people who were trying to book tickets had a similar experience while booking their tickets for Coldplay.
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?
Let us look at each one of the questions.
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.
Two days after the fiasco, on September 25, BookMyShow filed a police complaint against the 'third-party' apps that allowed people and dealers to resell tickets at inflated prices – up to Rs 7.7 lakh for a ticket originally priced at Rs 12,500.
The frustration only intensified when companies like Spreeh, UrbanMatch, WYLD and FinderBridge started offering Coldplay concert tickets as giveaways on social media.
“What is your explanation for the sheer number of giveaways hosted by brands? How are so many brands offering mass giveaways? This clearly indicates early access,” commented @tooshietrash on Bookmyshow’s Instagram.
Now, here’s the question of the hour: Is reselling or scalping tickets illegal in India? And for those who tried but failed to get tickets, what can be done?
Abhinav Shrivastava, co-founding partner of GSL Chambers and advocate-on-record at the Supreme Court of India, explains that there is no specific central law in India prohibiting the resale of tickets at a higher price. However, if the seller specifies that tickets are ‘non-transferable,’ they can take legal action against the dealer or person reselling them.
In the case of Coldplay, however, reselling tickets is illegal. Shrivastava notes that under the Maharashtra Entertainment Act, the resale of tickets at inflated prices is prohibited. This law, however, does not apply to concerts happening in Delhi or other states.
Abhinav further explains that reselling could have been prevented if BookMyShow had made the tickets non-transferable, which, according to BookMyShow’s terms and conditions, was not the case. The tickets are ‘non-refundable without any exceptions’ but well, transferable.
The same logic applies to other concerts, including Diljit’s Dil-Luminati tour, meaning one can resell the tickets since neither the reseller (Zomato) nor the state restricts you from doing so.
Now, let’s look at our second question.
In November 2022, Swifties were in the same frenzy as Indian Coldplay fans are right now. The incident occurred when TicketMaster, an American ticket sales and distribution company, cancelled all planned ticket sales to the public for Taylor Swift's American tour in 2023 as 3.5 billion ticket requests from fans, bots and scalpers overwhelmed the website with record demand.
The company blamed it on a ‘technical issue’ and while some were able to get their hands on the tickets others did not so much. This again led to high prices on other third-party reselling websites for the Eras Tour concert tickets.
So then what did the Swifties do? They dragged the company to court and filed a 33-page complaint against TicketMaster's parent company, Live Nation Entertainment, claiming that it “has a monopoly on primary and secondary markets, and accuses it of engaging in fraudulent practices and various antitrust violations, including price discrimination and price fixing”.
The company also received criticism from US Congress members, who called out the company for having an “unchecked monopoly”.
Today, in India, BookMyShow also has a similar borderline monopoly, which cannot be a good sign. After all, the basic laws of economics say that “monopoly is an economic status that occurs when a company encounters no competition within a market or industry and can set its prices without oversight. Some types of monopolies occur naturally while others form when a company takes deliberate actions through legal or illegal means.”
