To hate the process for buying concert tickets☹️

[Onthemoooove]

First the Oasis debacle and now Radiohead.

DD is a massive Radiohead fan. Neither she or any of her friends were lucky enough to get codes which would allow them access to the booking site and, from what I hear, even those who did struggled to get affordable tickets or had countless issues with the site crashing, being kicked out under suspicion of being a bot etc etc. Getting tickets for any popular artist these days seems to be an extremely painful and complicated process!

I saw many big artists when I was younger and don't recall having much trouble getting tickets. For example, I saw Madonna at the height of her fame. I remember seeing it advertised, asking around my friends and 6 of us wanted to go so I collected their money and, as I worked near Wembley at the time, sauntered down to the box office in my lunch hour. It wasn't busy and I came away with my 6 tickets no problem.

While the Internet has certainly made many things easier, this is not one of them! Is the demand greater these days? Doubt it. It's so bloody frustrating!

Totally agree. Everyone should stop buying on StubHub or Viagogo. I was lucky enough to get a Radiohead code but couldn’t get tickets. There were loads on StubHub at ridiculous prices. Same for Florence and the Machine. Why can’t the secondary ticket sellers (who are clearly only wanting to make money) be banned! So annoying for real fans who just want to see their favourite band.

YANBU that getting tickets is a nightmare nowadays, but surely you realise that accessing those Madonna tickets was quite a privilege that many wouldn’t have been able to? Not many people would have worked or lived next to Wembley and been able to saunter down there. So great for, but not so great for many more others – and for countless others, getting tickets would have been near in impossible.

Difficulty in getting tickets nowadays is part and parcel in making them ten times more accessible.

Accessibility, ultimately, is a very good thing.

What’s more terrible is the prices.

I always say this, name a large amount of the big artists and I saw them, no hassle getting tickets, the code crap now is horrible!

I don't understand why it's so hard. Just make the tickets un-sell-on-able. The person going has to be the person who is buying the tickets plus up to 1/2/3 others. When you attend the event you have to show ID along with your booking confirmation - if the names don't match, tough luck, not allowed in.

Unfortunately it means people can't buy presents for others as surprises but that's a relatively small price to pay to stop this insanity.

The other alternative is going even stricter and you have to name every single person going, before buying the tickets, like buying flight tickets. In which case you could still buy surprise tickets for others.

If for whatever reason you can't make it the only way you can get money back is offering the tickets back to the original reseller i.e. ticketmaster) who will accept them minus booking fee or whatever deduction. Then the tickets go back into circulation again, but still only with the original seller.

The thing that confuses me is that the are so many tickets going spare on the reseller sites. I've looked before literally half an hour before the gig starts and they are still at full price or more. Surely it would be better to sell the ticket and make half your money back rather than lose all of it?

Yes, this is a bane of my existence.

Rant incoming.

1. I hate how early things go on sale and therefore sell out. You have to know exactly what you’re doing / commit to things up to 12 months in advance. I’m not exaggerating. A festival I’m keen to go to in May 2026 sold out in… May 2025. 😐 It’s madness.

2. The other issue is ticket touting. I went to buy a ticket from a resale website and clicked on the seller’s profile. It was a young man and he had completed 97 sales on the resale website. Clearly that’s more than just an innocent change of plans causing him to sell a ticket. He buys tickets at face value and sells at multiple times the price. It’s a source of income for some people.

3. Increased demand. I’m not sure when you purchased Madonna tickets so easily, OP, but my guess is it was some time in the 1990s. The population has grown substantially since then, but more importantly, the population of people with enough disposable income to spend on concert/festival tickets has grown hugely. Additionally, there’s changing tastes, people spend far more on “experiences” now than on material things, further pushing up demand (you see the same effect in travel destinations).

4. Social media. People hear about events more easily. No more flicking through Timeout magazine to see what gigs are on that weekend. Events are marketed on Instagram, Facebook etc. months and months in advance, you register for a “presale” (which is the only sale, for popular events), get sent a “code” and if you don’t login and join the queue to purchase at precisely when the presale begins (which is often 9am or 10am, so you’d better make sure you’re WFH that day and put that fake meeting in your calendar…), then you have no chance of getting a ticket.

TLDR: take me back to the 90s.

True, but there wasn't even a queue as I recall and there were plenty of tickets left so presumably people could phone tge bix office and pay with their card (sure I did that for various other concerts) and I believe you could also buy them in your local HMV etc. All much easier than registering online, praying you get a code and, even if you do, having no guarantee of actually getting a ticket!

Also, ticketmaster only let's you queue for the date you would like. Not the venue. Last year I'd been queuing for coldplay for a couple of hours when a message pinged up to say tickets for that date were almost gone and they'd added two new dates. Did it automatically filter me into that queue so I kept my place? No, I had to leave my queue and go to the back of the queue for a new date. I just wanted wembley, I can book annual leave once I've got any tickets for any date

My mum sent postal orders for her Stones and Beatles tickets back in the day 😭. I phoned for Madonna, Prince etc.

It's so shit, never used to be this hard to get gig tickets. I've stopped trying which is gutting as I love live music.

Not many people could phone though – you had to be at a landline and in a place where you could make a call. Now many more people can call from almost anywhere with their mobile. Call lines would be as swamped as online access.

I get what you’re saying, and it definitely felt simpler back then. But in reality, far fewer people had access. Now anyone with an internet connection or a phone can try, and with cheaper travel and global fanbases thanks to streaming, the pool of people competing is massive compared to before. That’s why it feels so much harder. The real problem isn’t accessibility – it’s the ridiculous prices and resale.

It’s shit for you now because you find it harder to access. Back when you found it easy, it was shit for the people who had no access or very difficult access.

It was always shit for someone.

That is usually people forgetting to de-list a ticket after they have sold it to a friend or some other way. I (innocently) had to resell a ticket as I bought it 6 months in advance (which I had to do to secure a ticket) then booked a trip that couldn’t be done any other time so couldn’t make it. I listed it on a couple of platforms then managed to sell it on social media. I can’t remember if I de-listed it off Crowdvolt, Stubhub etc. but maybe not. Those platforms guarantee buyers a refund if tickets aren’t transferred on sale for this reason.

I agree. I tried for Radiohead tickets, well I didn't even get the code. It's such a shame. I used to go to loads of gigs when I was in my teens and at uni and throughout my 20s. I've had no luck lately. I used to easily get festivals tickets too. Nothing sold out in minutes.

I think some of the problem now is the huge fan base these older bands have across many generations. Radiohead released their first songs in 1992 and are still amazing, they got together in 1985, that's 40 of collecting fans! It was the same with the Foo Fighters and Oasis, many years of releasing music and so hard to get tickets.

Agree, but it’s shit for everyone now. Even face value prices are extortionate. There are memes doing the rounds on social media which show a photo of a physical tickets from an Oasis concert in 2009, say, for £40 or so. That’s a fraction of even face value ticket prices now. They have far, far outstripped inflation before you even get to the horror of resale prices.

We tried to get Ed Sheeran tickets this week. No chance.

YADNBU

I have been trying to get tickets for The weekend for my dd she signed up for about 3 presale options which is ridiculous most of the tickets are gone before they even go on general sale. I think their sole purpose is to check demand and put up the price when they go on general sale. Didn't manage to get anything (reasonably priced) in presales plenty of VIP tickets for hundreds available, suddenly extra date released and my dh was off so got ok priced tickets but not great seats. For the first time I noticed different pricing depending on where in the stadium you're sitting, this is new not noticed this before. There was at least one to two hundred euro in the difference between one section and another!

As much as I moan though not sure I could go back to queuing overnight for tickets like I did in the 90s or racing around town to different music shops as tickets were selling out.

It’s a rubbish system now but I have no idea how you do it differently.

What frustrates me is that the bandwidth of the websites never seems to be enough for big releases. Three of us had codes for Radiohead and tried to get tickets yesterday. All of us got through the whole process and then kicked out just as we’d reached the end of the waiting room and were entering the site to buy them. (We were all in different locations - all with just one tab open as it instructed). I was the only one of us that got tickets in the end.

As, when you did get a code, it was only valid for one country, I can’t understand why they didn’t release the tickets country by country on different days to stabilise the site traffic a little more.

Agreed. I can never get anything but dh has used ticket master a lot and seems to be straight in and get tickets at reasonable prices. Feels like it excludes so many people and the steps they’ve brought in don’t work to stop touts but make it really hard to get 5 tickets to anything as the limit is 4. We had to have 2 accounts for Reading festival as we were taking our 3 teens. Dh didn’t come to Taylor Swift because we could only get 4 due to the limit. Taking 3 teens across London in the crowds was slightly daunting and dh would have loved to see dc enjoyment.

Don’t get me started on the tickets on your phone. I prefer one in my hands rather than refreshing my phone and stressing my battery is running out. Gigs got hard 😭 I’m not convinced technology has improved things.

I managed to get tickets for Taylor S at Wembley and at a European date, I also got Coldplay tickets. Maybe I’ve just been lucky but I’ve been very focused always got presale access (never need to buy anything there’s always a link somewhere on their page) and researched how to do it. I only got Coldplay by being on discord and reading all the advice on it during the presale! Always join q ahead of time. I didn’t try for Oasis tho.

I was having this conversation with my DP last night. I never had issues getting tickets in the 80's - you just queued up at the box office and bought them. But saying that, bands were always touring and there seemed many more 'local' venues on their tours. I think now bands don't tour so often and tend to do big arena venues. All the faff with codes, VIP access, priority booking etc is just designed to sell over priced tickets. How long do we wait in queues only to be told we're now in the 'waiting room', then after another wait we're presented with a rubbish selection of over priced seats that we have to buy in the next 15 minutes otherwise we'll lose access.

I completely agree that prices feel awful. I paid about £35 back in late 90s. That would be about £60 today, so they have risen far above inflation. (Saying this, my Oasis tickets were £65 each). Resale and face value is still criminal though.

But I don’t think in good conscience, it’s fair to revert to the days of inaccessibility for most and ease for the few. Gigs should be available to all – the population increase, global demand and increased disposable income is always going to be part and parcel of that.

Also if you obsessively stalk Twickets and Ticketmaster nearer the time you can def get face value resales - but you have to properly commit !

Was it an equivalent ticket? I looked up that meme and it was Wembley ticket in 2009. Wembley tickets in 2025 starting price was over £100.

@Didimum £19! That’s £39 in today’s money!

The Oasis tickets I have are seated in the upper tier, 3rd row from front of the block). Sort of at halfway point in the stadium. The tickets I am remembering from around 2000/2001 for £30ish were Wembley arena, lower tier seated, back/side position.