Finshots Daily
The Coldplay and BookMyShow Ticketing Frenzy!
In today’s episode for 25th September 2024, we look at the chaos behind Coldplay’s concert ticket bookings and a potential way out.
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- Broadcast on:
- 25 Sep 2024
- Audio Format:
- other
Hello and welcome to Finn's Shorts Daily. In today's episode we talk about the Coldplay and Book my Show ticketing frenzy. Before we start of today's episode, we have a quick announcement. In the next 10 days many prominent life insurers will significantly dilute or remove a key feature of term insurance plans, the critical illness rider or the CI rider. With the CI rider, you and your family are given a lump sum if you are diagnosed with a critical illness giving you enough financial strength to tide over the crisis. The good news is that if you lock in on your plans now, most insurers are still offering the original benefits of this rider. You can talk to our team at Ditto for free to know more. The link to book a call is in the description below. Now on to today's episode. You're out for brunch on a peaceful Sunday when suddenly you notice people seated around all doing the same thing. Heads down, fingers raising across their phones. You wonder what's going on, until someone excitedly shouts, "I got them!" That's when it hits you. It's Coldplay ticket booking day and it's 12 known the exact moment tickets for their concert went live on Book my Show or BMS. By 1215 pm, social media was a blaze with stories of waiting lists, app crashes and disappointed fans lamenting their mischanced at the concert of the decade. For the uninitiated, Coldplay's Music of the Swears World Tour has been a phenomenon, grossing over $1 billion, becoming the first tour to hit that milestone. Naturally, the excitement was palpable, especially for those who have grown up with their music, but with great excitement comes even greater chaos and the BMS app didn't stand a chance. It crashed almost immediately and if you were one of the lucky few who managed to stay logged in, the tickets vanished faster than you could say "Viva la vida". But let's be honest, the odds were never in our favor. Just think about it, the DY Portal stadium where Coldplay will perform in Jan 2025 can accommodate around 50,000 people, add another 10,000 for standing room and that's 1.8 lakh tickets across 3 shows, but with 1.3 crore people vying for those tickets, each of us just had a measly 1.3% chance of snagging one. It's no wonder that Instagram was flooded with weightless screenshots stretching into the lags. And when demand skyrockets like this, a black market is almost inevitable. Tickets originally priced between 3,500 rupees and 35,000 rupees were soon popping up on resale platforms like VIA Gogo, which I'm going for as much as 10 lakh rupees. This trick, called scalping, is the digital ages version of those touts outside theatre selling black tickets at sky high prices. But why is this happening? You see, India's concert scene is booming, especially post the pandemic. For context, just last year, the organized live events sector grew by 20%, generating a whopping 8,800 crore rupees in revenue, even surpassing pre-pandemic numbers. And it's only getting bigger. An EY report says that the number of concerts with over 5,000 attendees each is expected to hit 300 by 2025. That's 50% more than in 2018. Besides, concert revenues are expected to jump to 1,000 crore rupees up 25% from where we are now. And if you look at Coldplay, the three shows alone are set to bring in over 100 crore rupees and ticket sales, throw in the surge in hotel bookings, flights and dining expenses and the economic impact skyrockets. Nearby hotels are already quoting 5 lakh rupees for a three night stay, with most rooms booked solid. Its classics supply and demand. Clearly, the industry is maturing. And the appetite for live events has never been stronger. But with this surge in enthusiasm, the flaws in our ticketing systems have become glaringly obvious. So how do we put an end to this frenzy you ask? One possible solution is to adopt a model like airport's use, requiring tickets to be linked to barcodes and verified with Adhar. But checking Adhar cards for 1.5 lakh people would be a logistical and a privacy nightmare, right? Another approach could be inspired by Zomato's book now sell anytime feature, which allows users to resell their tickets through the platform. You list your ticket at a fixed price pay a small fee and when it sells, you get your money back. But this system isn't foolproof either. As scalpers, could still take advantage of this buying tickets only to flip them for a profit. This leaves us with a potential fix that everyone's buzzing about. NFTs are non-fungible tokens. Imagine you draw a picture and give it to your friend. It's one of a kind and no one else can claim ownership. That's essentially what an NFT is, except that it's digital. It represents ownership of a unique item. So if Coldplay tickets were NFTs, each ticket would have a unique identity like a fingerprint. This would make it much harder for scalpers to resell tickets at inflated prices, as event organizers would know exactly who owns each ticket and who's trying to sell them. And then, there's already a proof that NFTs can work for ticketing. You could look at Thailand's Wonderfruit Festival. They switched to NFT ticketing and managed to reward concert goers. Or even Coachella, one of the biggest music festivals in the US, it adopted NFT tickets to protect fans from inflated resale markets as well as pass on numerous benefits. Plus, NFT tickets could offer extra perks, exclusive merchandise, backstage passes or even lifetime event access. Few of Coachella's NFT ticket holders were granted lifetime festival access, benefiting both the festival and original buyers as prices soared. So exploring NFTs to solve India's ticketing troubles is definitely worth a shot. It could make scalping a thing of the past. Give event organizers more control and ensure tickets go to genuine fans instead of opportunistic resellers. After all, with India's concert economy growing so rapidly, the ticketing system needs to evolve to keep pace and NFTs might be a way to address this challenge alongside other innovations in this developing market. As the music and ticketing market in India continues to expand too, we could see new solutions emerge. And who knows, maybe even virtual events are on the horizon. For now, many of us will have to settle for watching Chris Martin from our living rooms, but with better technology and fairer practices, perhaps next time we'll have a better chance at being there. Thank you for listening to today's episode. FinChots Daily is available on a bunch of streaming platforms such as Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts. So make sure you follow us on your favourite podcast streaming platform. Until next time.