When, last Wednesday, the news began to circulate that the Radiohead would not only have returned to perform, but they would have done four (!) Concerts in Bologna, just an hour of car from my house, I could not believe it. It was not only a date to be scored on the calendar, but the opportunity of a lifetime: seeing live the band that wrote the soundtrack of various sleepless nights, many trips by car and as many moments of pure bewilderment and consolation. I was ready for everything: to make the virtual row, to spend hours in front of the computer to try to buy, at a high price, a ticket for one of the dates (hoping to have more luck than last year, when I had tried to catch an Oasis ticket). Everything except surrender to me in front of an SMS that never arrived.

Let’s take a step back, for those who are not aware of the (hard) procedure decided by the British band “to reduce the competition of bots and tussks”. So they write on their official website: in order to try to buy a ticket for their concert, the Radioheads have established various “steps” to face. Step that, it must be said, even if followed in the correct way they did not even guarantee access to the ticket to the ticket.

First of all, it was first necessary to register for the official website of the group, from 11 on Friday 5 September and until 11pm on Sunday 7, communicating its email address and mobile number, in addition to the city in which it would be desired to see the band. After the registration, an SMS arrived containing a link on which to click, which would have made a registration confirmation email that took place.

End of the procedure? Macché. The email specifies that by 11 pm on Wednesday 10 September a second email would arrive “to let you know if you have an unlock code or not. By receiving an unlock code you can participate in the sale of tickets for one of the cities you have indicated”. Translated: if you arrive the good code for you, you can try to buy up to a maximum of 4 tickets – which will be sold according to the order of arrival and, therefore, even receive a release code does not guarantee that you have a ticket in the pocket. Otherwise I fat.

Obviously on Wednesday morning, at 11 precise, I was in front of the computer to register. I enter the email, the mobile number and a sign of Bologna as a favorite city (Thom Yorke and his companions have decided that the fans closest to the places of the concert will be facilitated). Fact: I am a screen that communicates that I will get a SMS to confirm my recording and says that, due to the high number of recordings, it may take a few hours, not to worry and not to repeat the procedure, because this could “have an impact on your suitability”. The wait begins. After a few hours I write to some friends: “But did the SMS come to you?”. Someone received it, someone didn’t. But even the latter, in the end, receive it.

Concerned, the next day I try to register again with another phone number and another email. Unlike the first attempt, this time he asks me to also enter the name and surname. How come? Well, it doesn’t matter: just get this blessed sms. Send and I start waiting impatiently, staring at the phone and trying to make it ring through Telecinesi. The days pass, on the weekend meeting of friends and – which did not happen to me since the time of the Nokia 3310 and the ringtones – I begin to envy the fact that they received an SMS and I don’t. I am looking for Reddit, on Facebook, on Tiktok: I find other incredulous people who have not received the message. By now desperate, I try to register again with a third email (but the same phone number, not having any others to be used anymore): nothing, nothing comes.

He arrives on Wednesday evening, but not the SMS. I don’t know what to think. I feel even more frustrated than last year after the “chaos oasis”: one account is to receive a closed door in the face due to a flash out, another is to feel blocked by a trivial technical disservice. Yet, in the FAQ section on the Radiohead website, there is no mention of the possibility that the SMS does not arrive. But that’s exactly what happened to me, with two different numbers and two emails (so as if it had happened to two distinct people). And who knows how many others, at this point.

The bitterness is all here: in being excluded not by slowness, not by distraction, but for a technological flaw in the system. It is not just a personal question: it is the reflection of a mechanism that over the years has become increasingly frustrating for those who really love live music. Today, accessing a concert is no longer a spontaneous act, but an obstacle race in which it is necessarily the most passionate, but the luckiest one, the one that is on the right side of the algorithm is necessarily.

So the doubt remains: how much does fan base matters, how much does the link with music matters, if a lost SMS in nothing is enough to exclude someone? After all, the problem is not to lose a ticket, but the feeling that music – born free and universal – ends up transforming itself into a privilege for a few. The intent of the Radiohead was not wrong: to create a pre -registry system served – as mentioned – to protect tickets from the hands of the bots and tussks, which now infest every online sale and which transform the passion into speculation. In short, a gesture to return music to authentic fans. But if in doing so you create a further barrier that risks excluding the fans themselves, then you are wrong.

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It is a cruel paradox: to protect the audience from the trap of the black market, but at the price of seeing the very possibility of participating in vanish. And so, in the end, the ideal of accessible and free music remains trapped in a technical short circuit, leaving out who would just have liked to sing, for one evening, together with their band. I, like many, will probably remain at home. With the headphones, perhaps to listen to ‘Ok Computer’, and with that annoying awareness that the distance between me and the Radiohead is not an hour by car, but a message that has never arrived.

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