The ticket fiasco surrounding Coldplay's Music Of The Spheres tour in India this January has been creating a lot of buzz. Things got so intense that Ashish Hemrajani, CEO and Founder of BookMyShow, was even summoned by the police.
Now, Ashish has finally opened up about the chaos during a panel discussion with NDTV at the World Audio Visual and Entertainment Summit. He was joined by Viraf Sarkari, Co-founder of Wizcraft International Entertainment and Vivien Lewit, Global Head of Artists at YouTube.
Addressing the issue, Ashish Hemrajani said, “There were a lot of things that were said during the booking phase about us. I think that is a little bit of maturity that is needed in the market. We are 1.4 billion Indians. It's a huge country. We had millions of people that were in the queue, trying to buy. In Bombay, it was 50,000 into three shows – that is 150,000. In Ahmedabad, it was about 110,000 into two shows – that is 220,000 tickets.”
“So we are talking about 370,000 tickets. Now, you know, there was a lot that was said. The queue was transparent. The token numbers were transparent. We have every customer's email ID, mobile number, device ID, transaction ID, and home address because we deliver the tickets to your home,” he added.
Talking about the band's massive popularity and backing up the math behind the overwhelming ticket demand, Ashish Hemrajani said, “So the supply-demand — if you see the numbers on YouTube today, you see the numbers of streaming for a band like Coldplay. They are the world's biggest band. They are the highest-ticketed band.”
“We have a large population, which is now a discerning, young demographic, which has disposable income. Where does the math go wrong? It's just that somebody didn't look at it. The appetite is there. The math is very much there,” he concluded.
For the unversed, Coldplay had a total of five concerts in India between January 18 and 26. When the tickets went live on BookMyShow in September, millions of people flooded the platform, trying to book their spots. In no time, tickets were being resold on other sites at insanely inflated prices.
Although BookMyShow claimed it had no involvement in the black market and even filed a police complaint to support that, the Economic Offences Wing (EOW) of the Mumbai Police still summoned CEO Ashish Hemrajani to explain what went wrong.
NDTV is at the inaugural edition of the Waves Summit, currently on at the Jio World Centre in Mumbai. The event brings together the who's who of showbiz, creators, and everyone who's anyone in the world of entertainment in India and beyond. Catch all updates on NDTV.com, from May 1 to May 4.