COLLAPSE BOARD

Would-be scalpers foiled by the addition of Coldplay

by Darragh Murray

WOODFORDIA – Those hoping to make a quick profit from buying up Splendour In The Grass tickets and selling them at inflated prices have blamed the British rock group Coldplay for the failure of the usually popular winter music festival to sell out.

“Every year for the past five years, Splendour In The Grass has sold out within a day. Suddenly someone gets the bright idea to include Chris Martin and co, and it all goes to shit,” said irate scalper John Simpson.

“What was I thinking? I mean who the f*&k will pay over $500 dollars to see a line-up which includes Coldplay?”

Simpson, who purchased upwards of 10 tickets to the festival minutes after they went on sale, calculates losses of up to $10,000 due to Coldplay. The large pool of legitimate tickets still available for purchase means that he cannot sell his extra tickets at inflated prices on Ebay.

“How am I going to feed my family now? How am I going to afford my casual drug habit? Chris Martin must pay!”, Simpson said.

Over the years, the team behind Splendour In The Grass have gone to extraordinary efforts to stop online ticket scalping, including having each ticket personally identified to each purchaser and preventing the resale of the tickets on online auction sites. According to Simpson, they’ve found the perfect measure for stopping those who had been able to bypass such measures.

“I’ve always found ways to get around their anti-scalping measures, but now, I think they’ve finally cracked it. I mean getting Coldplay to play? That’s a stroke of genius.”

“I’m afraid this will set up a dangerous precedent. Next Michael Bolton will be closing the Big Day Out and Richard Marx will be playing intimate mid-afternoon shows at St. Jerome’s Laneway,” he added.

When contacted by Collapse Board, industry expert Jeff Pollack was at a loss to explain why the festival had failed to sell out.

“Coldplay are quite simply the greatest band of the last decade. The fact that a festival that features them as headliners has failed to sell out is further proof that modern music fans are completely misguided. Tastemakers should hang their heads in shame.”

Pollack suspects that the Australian Federal Government’s removal of tax breaks for families earning over $150,000, as well as Coldplay’s appearance clashing with an episode of Masterchef Australia, as the probable reasons behind the lack of interest in the festival from among the band’s traditional audience.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 12th, 2011 at 5:15 pm. It is filed under Darragh Murray and tagged with A Week in the Life of Jeff Pollack, Chris Martin, Darragh Murray, Jeff Pollack, Masterchef Australia, Michael Bolton, Richard Marx, satire, Scalping, Splendour in the Grass. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.