Asia News: Coldplay In Malaysia; Korea Recording Association Petitions For Scalping Law Revision

MALAYSIA

Coldplay Survives Protests, ‘Kill Switch’

Coldplay’s sold-out November 22 concert in Kuala Lumpur was a huge success, according to various local media, despite the fact that a “kill switch” was reportedly in effect during the entire concert.

Because of the band’s public support for LGBTQ+ causes and problems caused by lead singer Matt Healy when The 1975 played Malaysia’s Good Vibes Festival earlier this year, the government had put in place an order to immediately shut down the Coldplay concert if the band did anything on stage that challenged Malaysia’s laws, which prohibits homosexual activities.

The Muslim Scholars Association of Malaysia, a political force, had earlier demanded that the concert be canceled outright.

The concert at the National Stadium Bukit Jalil, the band’s first in Malaysia, was attended by 75,000 people who were forced to put up with fairly heavy rainfall. Nevertheless, Yahoo Malaysia reported that the atmosphere was “electric” as the band “delivered a musical experience that surpassed the expectations of those in attendance.”

Coldplay played 26 songs that covered their entire career. At several points leader Chris Martin spoke to the crowd in colloquial Malaysian, recited a Malay poem, and improvised a song about Malaysia in which he acknowledged the rain and professed his love for Kuala Lumpur. At one point Martin even thanked the government “for letting us play here.”
However, for some fans the concert was a serious disappointment, but not because of Coldplay.

According to the website Gutzy.asia, a number of people who had bought tickets for the show were denied entry when it was found that they had bought them from fraudsters.
One group of friends said they had bought their tickets from a scalper for inflated prices and couldn’t get in. They paid the equivalent of $14,700 for the tickets, since they were boosted as VIP passes.

Kuala Lumpur wasn’t the only city where scammers were taking advantage of Coldplay fever. The Jakarta Post reports that on Nov. 20, the Central Jakarta Police in Indonesia arrested a suspect accused of selling more than 2,000 fake Coldplay concert tickets for $330,000.

The suspect told potential buyers that he personally knew the concert’s promoter.

KOREA

Scalping Law Revision Petition

The Record Label Industry Association of Korea announced that it is submitting a petition to the South Korean Ministry of Justice to revise scalping laws.

According to the K-pop website Koreaboo.com, the association chairman stated in the petition that “scalpers are a social cancer, like drugs.” Under current laws there is no prohibition against reselling tickets “for an amount exceeding the original price.”

The law covering ticket resales was implemented 50 years ago, and addresses situations that no longer apply today, when most such transactions take place online.

More importantly, the petition says that current circumstances make it much easier for scalpers to scam consumers. “Scalpers [do not deal in] resale products such as shoes, bags, etc.,” says the petition. The price of these products is “determined by their preservation value” over time, “but tickets are limited-time products and become useless after a certain period of time.”

Consequently, tickets for events should be treated the same as railway tickets, which cannot be sold by anyone except a “railroad operator or a person entrusted by a railroad operator.”

The petition goes on to explain scalping schemes that use programs and bots to automatically flood ticketing agents with orders so as to purchase as many tickets as possible in a short amount of time.