I paid for my ticket and saw what happened at the concert ground today. Metallica could not have got a more sane audience. The barricades had broken shortly after the gates were opened. This was long before the ground was even filling up with people. Those with slightly cheaper tickets were separated by another set of barricades and restricted to an area that was 200-250 metres away from the stage.

With people waiting for 4 hours since the gates opened at 3:30, you would expect people to be slightly agitated by the announcement that the concert was being postponed because of technical difficulties. There was no damage to the equipment because they’d taken all the equipment away before making the announcement. The only chaos that we could notice was people swearing and throwing their bottles on the stage when the announcement was made.

The media continues to quote unverified ‘sources’ and maintain that it was the audience that prevented this concert from happening today. I was actually pretty shocked at the way the Metallica crew were reacting, at one point even coming out to say “Let me call someone you can understand.”

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The organisation was obviously poor specially given that we had bought our tickets in August. But it’s interesting that so many people who have no idea about what happened like to think that its Delhi’s crowd that created an atmosphere unsuited to conduct an event of this scale.

Update: So Parikrama notes and YouTube shows evidence that couple of monitors were indeed trashed but much after the announcement. Note that all that stuff was insured. $1.1mn was made from just 20000 tickets worth 2750 each. There were 10000 other tickets sold too. Three months since we bought these tickets. Enough time to create barricades that would work against those leaning on them. The barricades were not really the ‘technical difficulty’. The real snag was the organisation and redirecting the blame towards the audience is a nasty move.

Update 2: Concert positively cancelled. Now waiting for refund.

Update 3: Metallica ticket amount refunded on credit card statement including processing fees. Good they took responsibility of the situation.