A recent, despairing call from my husband’s aunt about her three children missing out on the Coldplay tickets got me to survey the current pop music landscape in a new light.
All three of her children are working professionals in their 20s. My amusement pivoted into exasperation as she went on to describe the war-grade planning done in preparation for sale day. Credit and debit cards were ready, every phone and laptop in the house had been commandeered to log in, digitally queue up and get the tickets for a concert by the British band that recently announced its retirement. The sense of urgency was intensified by X threads listing the dos and don’ts of booking tickets, as well as friends frantically offering counsel on WhatsApp groups. Within moments of the sale going live, the website crashed and in 30 minutes, the tickets were gone, leaving a world of fans disappointed.
The aunt asked if my sway as a music journalist could help score tickets. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that using one’s professional influence in this way is unethical. So, instead, I told her I’d find out if I could buy the tickets from a reasonable resale website. But the black market was a black hole, where prices were in lakhs. The marketing manoeuvre of adding a third show — only two were planned in India, initially — only created more chaos. How is being a pop fan in India this tough?
While the CEO of BookMyShow was summoned, the company claimed that it had filed a complaint proactively, addressing concerns before the formal complaint against them. But why was BookMyShow allowing the tickets to be transferable? If their terms and conditions were clear about tickets being non-transferable, ticket scalping could have been avoided.
As I was figuring out the Coldplay madness, Punjabi singer Diljit Dosanjh’s Dil-Luminati India tour sold out too — in less than a minute. The mania even extended to a Shankar Mahadevan concert in Delhi, which was sold out in a jiffy. A couple of months ago, playback singer Shreya Ghoshal’s JLN Stadium concert played to a full house too, and sold out days before the actual performance.
I understand that live music should always come with a price, but this kind of demand for live concerts felt a bit unreal. When did the field of live music get so competitive in India?
There seem to be a couple of factors responsible for this. Besides the connection between consumption and FOMO (fear of missing out) that is at play, social media and reel culture are key reasons for this absurd hysteria. I’m sure more than a few actual Coldplay fans are heading to the concerts, but by and large, the rush for tickets seemed to be motivated by the desire for Instagrammable moments at the arena in Mumbai.
Take, for example, the hugely marketed Candlelight concerts, widely advertised on social media. I recently attended the Coldplay piano concert in the capital, as I quite like the band’s sound and frontman Chris Martin, who is outspoken on political and environmental issues. And who doesn’t want to be in the romantic setting the concert promised, seated among thousands of LED candles, listening to some sweet melodies and lyrical cliches?
As I sat at the sold-out gig among immaculately-dressed men and women and heard ‘Fix You’ and ‘Yellow’, among other songs, being played on a piano, the music seemed, at best, amateur. The pianist was clearly inexperienced and lost the notes way too often. I had come there for good music, but all I got was ambience. Most of the audience seemed satisfied, though, holding up their phones (when permitted), recording music in a beautiful-looking space, all ready for their Instagram reels to fly. It was more a consumption model. The fleeting feeling we call happiness — which so often comes from listening to good music — was not necessarily a factor.
The concert reminded me of an experiment conducted by The Washington Post in 2007, where Joshua Bell, one of the world’s best-known violin virtuosos, donned a T-shirt and baseball cap, and played his $3.5 million Stradivarius for 45 minutes at a busy subway station in Washington DC. While he picked and played some of the greatest violin works ever written, only seven people stopped, including a woman who had attended Bell’s concert three weeks earlier at the Library of Congress and was familiar with his work. Bell made $32 while busking, $20 from the woman who recognised him. Three days prior to the subway performance, a ticket to his concert in Boston cost at least $100.
In a world so dominated by social exhibitionism, where one is catering to a certain “like” economy, it’s hard for people to believe that something amazing is happening around them when there is no crowd or a long digital queue for tickets to a concert.
I, of course, am all for the consumption of music of any kind, but the fear and anxieties of YOLO (you only live once), the desire to always be in awe and be the object of someone else’s awe on social media is taking away the real freedom and happiness that comes with music. Instagram videos will probably stay for posterity, but why not just soak it all in and not lose the present, the art that’s created in the moment? I tried this approach the other day in the second part of a concert by violin virtuoso N Rajam (my phone’s storage had reached its limit). That short piece in raga Bhairavi that I heard, its contours and nuanced presentation, is what I remember best now. Because that’s what I felt the most. It stayed. And if it stays, it’ll probably guide us home.
suanshu.khurana@expressindia.com
