Coldplay Ticket Frenzy: How Tech-savvy Fans Beat The Queue Using 'Inspect Element'

The tickets to British band Coldplay’s Mumbai concert went live on September 22 on BookMyShow. Shortly after the sale went online, the craze around it reached a fever pitch. Several technical experts assert that by utilising the ‘Inspect Element’ function on the BookMyShow website, they were able to purchase Coldplay tickets ahead of the general public. These claims coincide with irate Coldplay supporters accusing BookMyShow of improper handling of ticket sales.

The sole official ticketing portal, BookMyShow, opened for ticket sales for the tour’s India leg on Sunday. Coldplay supporters, however, took issue with the fact that after hours of waiting in a virtual queue, all of the tickets were sold out. A few fans claimed that BookMyShow had booked passes for friends, high-profile attendees, staff members, and Instagram influencers while making it difficult for the general public to get in.

A few techies claimed to have used a straightforward approach to purchase Coldplay tickets without having to wait in queue at this time.

Archit Chauhan, the CTO and co-founder of Crib as well as a former Microsoft software developer, was one such techie.

The X post read, “We managed to get Coldplay tickets by using some inspect element tricks to find the “buy” ticket URL before it was available to the general public.”

According to Hindustan Times, it must have been a case of an Inspect Element trick where before the tickets were officially on sale to the public, the website may have loaded the ‘Buy Ticket’ URL in the code but in fact, that was not visible or clickable on the page.

Through the Inspect Element option, a person would be able to see the elements that are not shown on the website and would find the link to buy tickets.

A number of other techies mentioned utilising Inspect Element to get tickets to Coldplay.

They uploaded screenshots that showed their success. It’s unclear, though, if anyone was able to purchase the tickets through this method.

BookMyShow has issued a warning, however, about buying tickets from unofficial sites where Coldplay tickets are being offered for as much as Rs 3 lakh.