Last September, when ticket sales for Coldplay’s Mumbai and Ahmedabad concerts in January went live, 13 million fans bet on the fastest finger first, hoping to get lucky with the 1,50,000 available spots, eventually causing the BookMyShow website to crash. Playing into the fandom’s desperation, resellers ludicrously overpriced tickets and people, giddy with excitement, handed their credit cards over. The craziness that played out over Coldplay concert tickets remains a pivotal moment in the timeline of live musical acts in India (and of course proved meme gold).
Concertgoers have piggybacked on phrases like “once in a lifetime”, “best band on earth” and “FOMO” to explain this frenzy. So naturally, other take-all-my-money opportunities followed—in the past few months, India has seen retro acts like the Backstreet Boys and Bryan Adams, more relevant artists such as Ed Sheeran, Maroon 5 and Dua Lipa, and festival headliners like Green Day and Shawn Mendes. Now, in less than a month, Mumbai will host Guns N’ Roses’ 2025 concert, where tickets start at ₹7,265 (with taxes) and go up to ₹1,29,000 if you want to watch a sexagenarian Axl Rose play old-school hits with Slash.
In the aftermath of it all, we can’t help but wonder: just how much are we willing to spend to breathe the same air as our favourite artists? And was it really, really worth it? Seven people who live-love-sometimes-just-like music, speak to us in cold, hard numbers.
