It’s a conundrum of basic economics: Can prices be kept affordable when demand heavily outweighs supply? It is usually onions, fuels or rare earth metals like dysprosium that trouble us with the question, but this week, it was concert tickets that sparked outrage and stirred musings.
Last Sunday, about 13 million Coldplay fans of all ages went online and joined a long queue to snag a grand total of 150,000 tickets. Naturally, there was heartbreak, as all entry passes for the British rock band’s January show in Mumbai were sold out in less than half an hour.
Within minutes, tears turned to howls of anger as thousands of tickets popped up on reseller sites at astronomical prices, some of them five times their face value.
In a country once known to seek out free passes and special access, this willingness to fork out eye-popping sums is astonishing. Who is this concert-goer happy to break the bank and spend over a lakh rupees to watch an artist live on stage?
Price pops in the secondary market of ‘scalped’ tickets are one thing, but even primary purchases at ‘official’ windows can set one back by ₹4,000 to ₹35,000 per seat to watch star performers like Ed Sheeran, Dua Lipa, Diljit Dosanjh or Coldplay.
Such a premium is only within the reach of a small but well-off bunch looking for the adventure of a lifetime. Many could fly abroad for a concert.
Once Coldplay tickets soared out of reach, a few who ‘did the math’ concluded it would work out cheaper to catch the band’s show in Abu Dhabi than buy a scalped ticket for Mumbai.
But then, there is nothing like the thrill of seeing such a gig right here in one’s backyard. Tours are typically designed to exude a local vibe, and this band’s desi touch—witness its fondness of Devanagri—may have stoked fan expectations of the spectacle on its way.
It’s part of today’s ‘experience economy,’ with one’s presence prized all the more for a chance to live the moment on social media (or “Insta it”). Sellout concerts tend to have a young fan-base profile. Diljit Dosanjh’s Dil-Luminati Tour sold out in minutes.
It took less than 24 hours for tickets to be scooped up for Karan Aujla’s shows scheduled this December. It was the same with Dua Lipa’s Feeding India concert due in November. In contrast, tickets for 90s rocker Bryan Adams’ December tour are still available, though selling steadily.
As those who were left empty-handed have asked, must we resign to raw market forces—or can we find a way for budget-bound real fans to gain access? After all, scalping is in a grey zone, legally.
Also, why should a band like Coldplay, which claims to donate part of its tour earnings to charity, get less revenue than it could while shady resellers strike a jackpot? Some sites are alleged to deploy bots to buy up tickets faster than the speed of sound.
Artists can and do try to privilege their fans. Taylor Swift tried. After a dynamic-pricing algorithm pushed prices for her Eras Tour to prohibitive levels, she began assigning codes for fans to offer them priority, but seats were still a scramble.
Coachella, a music festival, has dabbled with non-fungible tokens twice, packaging lifetime passes with exclusive benefits to stymie bots and resellers, but didn’t get far.
Yet, in this age of technology and captcha barriers, it may not be hard to design a system that blends the market idea of an open auction with a musical scheme of bidding chips as handouts for loyal fans, as AI tools may be able to help identify. Let a better world be the hymn for the weekend.
