Gig tickets - Educate me...

It's generally a massive con, unless they are £5 tickets for your local up and comming band at the local club/pub.

I wouldn’t assume that’s not retail. A quick google suggests cheaper tickets have gone

Years ago before the current madness I took my daughter to see Glee at the O2. The front block were sold for £400 a ticket

This might help

https://www.stereoboard.com/coldplay-tickets/manchester/2023-06-03#2023-06-03

Is it a case of researching future tours and then getting online (where?) at 06:00 on a specific date and furiously trying to compete with everyone else and their bots?

I’m afraid so. I go to loads of gigs and I get on the mailing list of venues and ticket sales sites so you know what’s coming up and when the tickets go on sale

This is greatly aided by having a 19 year old daughter who you go to gigs with, who has a considerably better memory than you 😃

follow your bands on social media
sometimes you get presale access, or early bird codes
the band will usually link directly to the official seller when tours and gigs are announced
but yes, you want to be on the buy queue at the point of ticket release.. and even then you might need a good deal of luck or bigger bands
nowadays, i buy tickets ASAP and worry about the logistics later, can usually sell tickets i needed

oh yer, and subscribe to their mailing lists

You can set up alerts for genres or bands with Ticketmaster but I have recently found Songkick which I prefer as it covers a much greater range of venues/more niche smaller bands etc.

I do miss the days of seeing gigs being advertised in Kerrang, Sounds and Yorkshire Evening Post (local to Leeds), then getting a train into Leeds to go to Jumbo Records or sending off a cheque and a pre-paid envelope to the store to get my tickets. And proper paper tickets with stubs and everything! Mutter, mutter, grumble, grumble.

You need to get on the band's website and subscribe to mailing lists which will give advance warning so you can be in the queue as soon as it opens. Even then if it's someone highly sought after there are still resellers that somehow manage to get on first and snap them up although some artists are now putting mechanisms in place to try and prevent it.

A quick google suggests the face value of the ones you're looking at is somewhere around £60-80 so yes, you are being ripped off.

https://www.seetickets.com/event/coldplay-music-of-the-spheres-world-tour/etihad-stadium/2398033

£200 each!! That would fund my gig going for a year, and I go to quite a lot (quick finger check - I've done maybe 10 this year so far?). And they were all better than Coldplay 😉

It must be a typo. Gig I went to on Sunday was £8 and it was much better than Coldplay 🤣🤣

I'd pay £400 not to see Coldplay.

Ticket prices have gone crazy in recent years.
Ticketmaster are taking the piss. They immediately sell out and are listed on their other site for 5x the ticket price.

Much prefer going to Manchester academy, bread shed, rebellion bar for to see new bands

It’s a mugs game going to see these big gigs at enormodomes. I saw 9 bands on Saturday for £38.50…

However occasionally something comes up that you feel you can’t miss- eg pulp this summer. Tickets went on sale while I was at work and had sold out before I could get some. However my mate bagged 4 so we are going with them…. And then cos we didn’t get glasto tickets we bought latitude tickets instead so I’ll see them twice in 6 days…

Twickets is good for last minute tickets as they are fan to fan and never above face value. I doubt you’d find Coldplay tickets in there…

Ticket prices have gone crazy in recent years.

I do have a certain amount of sympathy with artists as streaming means that gigs are the only way bands can make any money nowadays.

But this doesn't excuse the ticket sellers absolutely milking it to rip people off and artists (like Coldplay for example) who are already multi-squillionaires selling tickets for insane money.

A mate works at Manchester Arena (which is a bloody awful venue - a soulless corporate hanger) and was telling me that front row tickets for the big artist can cost thousands each

Mind you... if people are daft enough to pay it...

I just bought Sleaford Mods tickets for the Warehouse Project (which is a bloody fantastic venue) for 25 quid each

In fact right now there are 2 pairs of standing tickets for Coldplay at the etihad 3/6/23 at just £222 per ticket- face value plus Twickets fee.
You’ve no excuse not to go now. (If you hang on they may start accepting offers below face value…)

’d pay £400 not to see Coldplay.

ill be honest here - i got given some tickets to see them in crystal palace about 14 yrs ago in their heydey. despite my favourite tshirt being my makecoldplayhistory t shirt. at the time they represented the part of teh music industry i really dont like. HOWEVER i went to teh gig (with the missus for max brownypoints!) and they were actually really really good, like really good. much to my, chagrin, surprise and disappointment. I still cant listen to their songs though.

on the flip side i went to an oasis gig and it was, absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt, the worst gig i`ve ever attended. that said - oasis have always been shit.

in terms of the OP you have to buy early on presale. I got an O2 phone contract just for teh presales.

What annoys me is when you try and get tickets on Ticketmaster and they are all sold out in 10 minutes, after 11 minutes there are 100's on a resale site.....owned by Ticketmaster despite stating they would stop it.

mate and I went to see the Stone Roses, tried repeatedly at £68 per ticket and couldn't get onto site, they were up for resale whilst we were still in queue on Ticketmaster on another of their sites for £200 a ticket

I think we can all be in agreement that the main ticketing agencies are absolute parasites

Try and buy from the venue directly so at least any fees go direct to venue. Ticketmaster only get an allocation. I saw James at Blackpool, better selection of tickets at better prices on opera House website direct.

However occasionally something comes up that you feel you can’t miss- eg pulp this summer. Tickets went on sale while I was at work and had sold out before I could get some. However my mate bagged 4 so we are going with them….

My son tells me that he joined the queue for Pulp in Sheffield 4 seconds after it opened. He was 130,000th in the queue

Luckily a friend dialled at the same moment cut London tickets

Right, all good info, thanks.
As I thought, ticketmaster etc are up there with Ins'co's as corps that I despise.
Joining mailing lists/ fanclubs etc not gonna happen so I guess I'll remain gigless.

Cheers all.

Joining mailing lists/ fanclubs etc not gonna happen so I guess I’ll remain gigless.

Why? Just set up an email for that if you have real concerns; you'd really miss out on one of the great experiences (live music) because you don't want to join a mailing list.

GigAlert app on the smartphone will help get you advance info on your favourite artists. Also Spotify/Deezer/Tidal will have links to tours on the artist biography pages.

I was looking at tickets for OSEES the other day at the local(ish) small(ish) venue. Only available either through Ticketmaster or on the door on the night. Ticketmaster want $15 on a $35 ticket! It's liable to sell out, so don't want to wait until the night. Really don't know what the solution is, both punters and bands need to start boycotting Ticketmaster.

As always, Goth Bob knows the deal:

Robert Smith being Robert Smith

As everyone has said, sign up for the artist’s promotion sites, and for agencies like See Tickets, Gigantic, etc, and many venues have their own alerts.

I’d signed up to Kate Bush’s web site many years ago, just to get news of any new recordings, so it was a surprise when she announced a month-long residency at Hammersmith in London, in 2014. I then got an email saying I had access to a presale 48 hours in advance of the main ticket sale, (another advantage). Tickets were very limited as to days and locations in the venue, I needed three, for a weekend, or close to as possible. To cut a long story short, I managed to bag three tickets on a Friday in the stalls! No idea where. When I checked, they were Row E, 21, 22, 23. Which turned out, when we got there, to be front row centre! Unbelievable.

Ticketmaster are scum, they operate a huge monopoly, and governments seem reluctant to break them up. They own a lot of venues, they have a stranglehold of ticket retail, and they have their own re-selling business, so they basically have scalpers hoovering up loads of the best tickets using bots, then reselling at a huge markup. Plus they’re operating a flexible pricing system like airlines do, where the price rises with demand, in America at any rate, which results in tickets for someone like Springsteen or Taylor Swift tickets for maybe $60 selling for $5000! It’s a legal racket, and the Monopolies Commission need to step in and break it up.

Having said that, all costs for touring artists have shot through the roof, fuel costs, wages for lighting, sound and road crew have all gone up, operating costs for the venues the same, and then there’s the colossal cluster* that is Brexit and the visa situation for touring artists which, thanks to the asshole that is BoJo, it’s virtually impossible for small bands to tour Europe, because of cross-border rules and the prices demanded.
Still, it’s possible to see good artists for reasonable amounts, upcoming I’ve got tickets for Jesca Hoop, £17.50, The Joy Formidable, £18.50, and The Indigo Girls, £36.30, although that one’s at a large London Venue, they’re American and they’re bringing a band, instead of being a duo, which is how I’ve mostly seen them previously.

I’ve also got a ticket for Peter Gabriel at the O2, London, next month. I managed to get the last available ticket for the seated floor area, Block A, Row K, Seat 1. It was an insane amount of money, but each time I’ve seen him previously, the tours have been ten years apart! And he’s now in his 70’s, so it’s likely the last tour he’ll ever do. Plus, I’ve had a big chunk of money from a redundancy payout, and from my pension, and if I don’t grab the chance, as friends have said, I can’t take the money with me, and I’ll regret it for the rest of my life. I missed seeing him on the last original Genesis tour, so * it, I’m going!

What annoys me is when you try and get tickets on Ticketmaster and they are all sold out in 10 minutes, after 11 minutes there are 100’s on a resale site…..owned by Ticketmaster despite stating they would stop it.

All they did was limit purchases to 4/6/8 tickets per transaction to stop the resellers using bots to buy everything in milliseconds. The resellers just used more bots buying the max amount in seconds. Same result for us lot. The easy way to stop it is to go back to sending physical tickets to the purchaser at their billing address, no resale unless you have a code that's on the ticket. But that's too hard apparently.

Try and buy from the venue directly so at least any fees go direct to venue. Ticketmaster only get an allocation.

Ticketmaster have bought a lot of the rights to sell in the venue's ticket offices over the years so that doesn't apply to a lot of venues. They even have the cheek to charge a delivery fee when you buy in person!