Need Another Reason to Go to the Library? Coldplay Is Hiding Free Concert Tickets in Books
Coldplay is hiding concert tickets in unexpected places. (Photo: Coldplay/Twitter)
Whether or not you’re a fan of Coldplay’s music, you have to give the British rockers credit: Through their latest venture they’re giving literature and public libraries some serious shine. And they’re doing it in a manner that would surely make another Brit, Sherlock Holmes, proud.
The band is sending fans into the stacks as part of a global scavenger hunt promoting its upcoming album, Ghost Stories. The prize: one pair of golden tickets to a Coldplay show in London.
According to the band's website, envelopes containing lyrics from the nine songs on the album have been stashed in nine libraries in nine countries around the globe. The lyric sheets, handwritten by lead singer and multi-instrumentalist Chris Martin, are concealed in ghost stories. One of the envelopes contains the "golden ticket," free concert tickets.
There are more than 9,200 public libraries in the United States alone, so conducting a search like this on a global scale is akin to hunting for a needle in a Coldplay haystack. Fortunately, the band is offering clues to the locations of the lyrics on the official Coldplay Twitter account.
On Monday morning the band tweeted, “CLUE: The megalibrary in MX is a capital idea. Search for Charlie D's festive spirits en español. ¡Ándale! ¡Ándale! #lyricshunt”
It didn’t take long for the band’s savvy fans to swarm Mexico City’s Vasconcelos Library, which has been on every "most amazing library in the world" list since it opened in 2006, and find the handwritten lyrics to the song “Magic” in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. Good news for fans: The envelope did not contain the golden ticket.
Some likely left the library disappointed that they didn't win, and without taking home the classic Dickens book—or any of the 580,000 other ones on the shelves. But one of the wonderful things about libraries is that they contain something for everyone. You just have to get folks in the door so they can discover the treasures inside. The rockers could have done a random Internet drawing to give away the tickets and the handwritten lyric sheets, so it's great to see them supporting the literacy cause in such a public way.