Radiohead's tour sells out as fans with codes are thrown out of the queue

All 20 dates of Radiohead's European arena tour, their first concerts since 2018, sold out on Friday 12 September. On the morning of the sale, fans in the UK who held unlock codes were thrown out of the AXS queue as suspected bots. One posted that a bot was telling him he couldn't buy because he was suspected of being one; another signed off his complaint “NotOK Computer”. AXS, the UK ticket agent, told them the tickets had either sold or were sitting in other people's baskets.

Only fans who registered at radiohead.com over a weekend at the start of September, and were then sent a code, could buy at all, and the band said this would cut out bots and touts. A code was good for up to four tickets to one show. Most tickets went to fans living nearest each city, with shares kept for fans travelling from elsewhere in Europe and beyond. Prices were fixed, and every ticket carried a £1 or €1 levy for grassroots venues or Médecins Sans Frontières, which the band matched.

The codes went out two days before the sale, and most of those who registered got a refusal instead, saying registrations had far exceeded the tickets available. One refused fan asked on X why the band had not used W.A.S.T.E., their online shop, to reach their long-standing customers.

Before the sale had even opened, FEAT, the Face-value European Alliance for Ticketing, counted 1,751 Radiohead tickets on the Berlin resale site Ticombo, many at €1,500 or more. The Guardian found 30 tickets for a single O2 night listed together at more than £22,000 by one trader, the Swiss firm Worldtix AG; Ticombo took the listings down after the paper got in touch. On the morning of the sale Julie Calland, Radiohead's manager, told the paper that management would work with venues, promoters, FanFair Alliance and FEAT to shut down unauthorised listings, most of them for tickets that did not exist. The registration process, while not a perfect science, is an attempt to deliver tickets as fairly as possible directly to fans at the prices the band intended², she said.

In Italy the ticket sites crashed under the traffic and buyers who dropped out of the queue could not get back in, while some there complained that codes had reached people in the United States and Canada. Rolling Stone Italia said the tickets went in half an hour. By the end of the day Viagogo was listing two Bologna standing tickets with a face value of €100 at £657 each.

After the sell-out the band said on Instagram that a few more tickets might yet go to registered fans, and that the official resale, open only to those who registered and at face value plus fees, would start on 13 October. Please don’t be tempted to buy from third-party ticketing platforms. Those tickets are not real.⁵

From registration to sell-out