I was never into Coldplay. But when their India shows turned into a ticketing fiasco, with demand far exceeding supply, the most creative nugget I found was that some fans had booked rooms in a plush hotel overlooking the stadium where the British band is due to perform in January 2025, a pleasant backdoor way of bucking the system.
It reminded me of cricket fans sitting on trees outside stadiums to get a good vantage point. It also reminded me of the ODI Men’s World Cup final in Ahmedabad where the demand for accommodation was so high that people were reported to have checked into hospitals for an overnight stay and a symbolic full body check-up the next morning, before heading off for the match.
In the case of Coldplay, the crashing of BookMyShow website left genuine fans stranded in virtual queues, and ridiculously overpriced tickets turned up on the black market. This raises some questions: how much can singers and bands charge their audience, and how much are concert-goers willing to pay? Specifically, how far can both sides go?
The trend is to do surge pricing, just like cab hailing apps do during peak traffic hours. For instance, Ticketmaster’s dynamic pricing for American singer Bruce Springsteen’s 2023 US tour meant that some tickets were selling for as high as $5,000. The Boss defended the high price, telling Rolling Stone that it prevented undeserving touts from collecting the overflow. “I’m going, ‘Hey, why shouldn’t that money go to the guys that are going to be up there sweating three hours a night for it?’” he told the magazine.
This approach doesn’t work for every artist. The BBC reported that the priciest tickets for Billie Eilish’s 2025 UK tour cost £398, and are still available months after going on sale. And Billie is big!
But what about the smaller bands? The critically lauded British music group English Teacher, who won the UK’s prestigious Mercury Prize earlier this month, were stuck in the financial dumps before the career-changing prize.
In an earlier interview to the The Guardian, English Teacher revealed they had yet to turn a profit from touring, despite being signed by a major label, Island, and appearing on shows like ‘Later… With Jools Holland’. Their lead singer, Lily Fontaine, said, “The reality is that it’s normal for all of these achievements to coexist alongside with being on Universal Credit, living at home or sofa surfing…The only thing we ever make any kind of profit on is festivals, because the fees can be higher, but any money left over just goes towards the next outgoings.”
So much for the glamour of the overpriced music scene.
India and Western music
An outsider watching the Coldplay madness play out in India can be forgiven for thinking that this is a massive untapped market, hungry for music. Coldplay is an exception. The truth is that India has never been a lucrative playground for cutting edge international music.
Think about the 1990s when Britpop was in the air, and bands like Oasis, Blur, Pulp, Portishead, Supergrass, Gene, and Shed Seven were everyone’s favourite. The albums used to be on cassettes on legit labels.
The same goes for alternative American bands of that era – Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, Smashing Pumpkins, Weezer, The Offspring, Hole, Blind Melon, Soul Asylum, and Gin Blossoms.
These bands’ music was broadcast on local MTV and that was about it. Did they get played on Indian FM? No. Did they ever come to India to perform? No. Did Elton John and Billy Joel perform here either? No. What could be the reason?
For one, the class of Indians that listens to Western music has always been orthodox and distinctly throwback in their tastes. A little out of date, though not for the lack of choice. They’ve never had the nous. They still don’t.
Back then, when Nirvana and Blur were all the rage in America and Britain, the most popular songs that Indian kids were listening to were Pink Floyd’s ‘Another Brick in the Wall’ and ‘Comfortably Numb’, ‘We Will Rock You’ by Queen and ‘Hotel California’ by Eagles. While the world had moved on to grunge, we were still stuck with classic rock. Veteran bands like Deep Purple and Jethro Tull played in Delhi, while metal acts like Sepultura made a beeline straight for Shillong, Meghalaya.
The contemporary young bands of the time didn’t bother about India, but headed straight to tried and trusted destinations like Latin America, Japan, North America, Europe, Australia, even South East Asia. India never had the critical mass. It never had a substantial fan base. Bryan Adams was our biggest international star that we adored, and he obliged with several visits. He’s coming again this year for a tour.
Bollywood director Subhash Ghai brought singer Samantha Fox to Bombay in 1990, but the biggest star of the moment, Madonna, couldn’t be bothered. When Guns N’ Roses finally came in 2012, it was a watered down version of the original rock band, with frontman Axl Rose being the only remaining original member. There was one exception: Michael Jackson did come, making a stopover at politician Bal Thackeray’s place, who was then the self-styled king of Bombay. Thackeray famously quipped, “He even used my toilet.”
Another problem with India is that when a big star does arrive for a concert, there is a long line of bureaucrats, politicians, police officers, and VIPs clamouring for free passes. It’s a bummer for the organisers.
Also read: Indian music isn’t a one-trick pony. Shankar Mahadevan, Zakir Hussain Grammy proves it
Musical impoverishment
A country of India’s size and diversity is consumed by its own music – the soundtracks from films in different languages being the dominant culture. Nothing wrong with that. Even now, the numbers, at least in North India, come in from desi hip hop acts like Seedhe Maut and Punjabi pop singers like AP Dhillon and Diljit Dosanjh. Coldplay aside, we are just not interested in the world.
Many of the 1990s bands mentioned earlier have reunited for nostalgia tours, with some new songs thrown in. Now, since India’s economy has changed over the past couple of decades, and we have better infrastructure and purchasing power, are any of these bands coming to make up for lost time and cater to their middle-aged fans? No. It still doesn’t add up. A country of a billion doesn’t have the numbers. American punk rock band Green Day is coming this year – the only one from that era. In 1995, they performed in Jakarta, but not Bombay. They will repeat Indonesia in 2025.
These days, with all the major streaming platforms available, Indians are exposed to new music in real time. The pioneers of today, like English Teacher, Idles, and Fontaines DC, which are widely considered the best guitar bands of this era, and rap acts like the burgeoning Belfast trio, Kneecap, hardly have a fan base in India. The popular bands, which are huge around the globe at the moment, don’t turn up in India because Indians don’t listen to them.
What do we get excited about? Coldplay, by now a pretty retro act itself, like a well-worn jumper. The Indian listener seems to be saying, “Country roads take me home, not to new pastures.” In a nutshell, we are not on the international music map, by any stretch, and the reason is we are not curious or open to new music, apart from generic global trends like K-pop. It simply doesn’t resonate.
And yet, an Indian band, Peter Cat Recording Co., has cracked North America and Europe. The Delhi NCR-based five-piece is currently on a 78-city world tour, playing to packed mixed White and Black audiences. India gets only six gigs, right at the end of the tour. PCRC sings in English and stays away from fusion, the only way an Indian band could export their music in the past. In terms of achievement, what they have done with their albums and tours is comparable with the crossover heft and seminal influence of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.
While Indians go ape over a tame British band, an Indian band has taken the West by storm, and is genuinely breaking new ground. In that lies the story of the Indian audience’s self-inflicted musical impoverishment.
Palash Mehrotra (@palashmehrotra) is the author of ‘The Butterfly Generation: A Personal Journey into the Passions and Follies of India’s Technicolour Youth’, and former Contributing Editor, Rolling Stone, India. Views are personal.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)