Coldplay India concert 2025: When 13 million fans logged in to book tickets

As British-rock band Coldplay comes to India in January 2025 for the Music Of The Spheres World Tour 2025, it has been both joy and heartbreak for fans across the country as 1.3 crore people attempted to secure tickets

“We’ve been in queues for Taylor Swift tickets. This should be easier,” a friend said, the night before. Big concerts in India are few and far between. Sure, music festivals are slowly but surely picking up and we have a lot more acts coming in, but a Coldplay concert, the Music Of The Spheres World Tour 2025 is truly a rare event – an  ‘Adventure of a Lifetime’, if you must. Coldplay last visited India in 2016 for a concert that older millennials fondly remember with much joy. 

It has been a day since what will now be referred to for years to come as ‘Coldplay ticketing Sunday’, and the Internet is divided. There are those who have managed to secure tickets, in disbelief, and the wary acceptance of those who have not been as lucky. Many others are in denial, on reels and tweets wondering if anyone has actually secured tickets at all?

There are other innovative, yet expensive solutions — debating if it would be a good idea to book a room at the Marriott in Navi Mumbai near the DY Patil stadium, for a different piece of the concert experience. Scalpers too are dime a dozen, and there is much anger on tickets being resold at astronomically high prices, and how it would make better financial sense to plan and head to a concert abroad. 

In the lead up to Sunday when the ticketing was to begin, many took to carefully memorising the seating charts, analysing several reels detailing which would be the best seats to book, and making plans across cities for group bookings. There were some pertinent questions raised across groups — how would we log in through our mobiles and laptops and still manage to stay in touch with each other if one of us got through? Do we all get on a Zoom call and let it run in the background? If we only got two tickets instead of four, who would we politely ask to leave? 

Despite such extensive prep in place, it was not long before everyone arrived at the screaming realisation that the path to the adventure of a lifetime, would be an adventure in itself. 

While ticket bookings were expected to begin at noon, chaos ensued when ticketing portal Bookmyshow crashed, seemingly unable to take the lakhs of people logging in to try their luck. Even through the chaos, the memes flew fast, with numerous references to Coldplay’s ‘Fix you’ being turned to “fix it”. When the ticketing began a few minutes later and people got into the virtual queue, they found themselves waitlisted in the thousands, or even in lakhs. A third show was added as well, giving fans another chance to try their luck with tickets.

Chennai-based Ashwin Radhakrishnan, who managed to book a ticket for his friend, attributed his skill, and luck to booking tatkal tickets for trains regularly. “I have a great strike rate, and have sort of gotten used to the system. We keep trying until we get it. A friend challenged me to book a ticket for her, and I managed to get her a standing ticket for the second day of the concert,” he said.