If you are going to buy concert tickets and you want to save money, how do you know when the best time to buy tickets for a concert is? It’s a good question, and if you’re going to go see a really popular band or artist play, then concert tickets can be really expensive. Saving a few bucks—or more than a few bucks—is a big deal in these cases.
Unfortunately, there’s no easy answer to this question. It really needs to be taken on a case-by-case basis. And it depends on the site that you’re going through, too. Here, we have put together a brief guide to help you get the best seats at the best prices for the best concerts.
Different Sites, Different Philosophies
Depending on the type of ticket site that you are looking at, you will find that there are different ways of pricing tickets. The most common method is that the individual selling the ticket picks their own price and then the site tacks on a service fee. With ticket exchanges, this is commonly used, although the fee that you will see varies depending on certain factors. The other type of site that you will see is an aggregator, where the ticket site looks at a whole bunch of other ticket sites to give you the data that you are looking for. An example of a ticket aggregator would be SeatGeek, while an example of an exchange that is commonly used is TicketNetwork.
Both of these types of sites have great deals at various times, and we recommend going through as many sites as possible when you are looking for the best deals. For simplicity, we’ve highlighted the sites that we’ve found to be the most reliable. We highly recommend them.
The bottom line is that there are a lot of different options for you out there, and just because one site doesn’t have the tickets that you’re looking for at a given time does not mean that another site won’t.
Moving On to Timing
Now that we have the basics of where to buy tickets out of the way, we need to focus on when. This isn’t an exact science, please remember, but there is a lot of worth in looking at what averages and statistics say. These apply to the majority of cases, but certainly, you will stumble upon exceptions, especially if you buy tickets often. But for now, this is the method that is most likely to apply to your situation.
Some resources have mentioned that the mathematically best time to purchase tickets is about a month after they go on sale. Some people believe that the best time to get your tickets is a few days—or even a few hours—before the event itself. At this point, people are desperate to make some money back on their investment and they’re willing to slash prices just so they aren’t hit with a huge loss. But that seldom happens with frequency. Instead, individuals looking to unload their tickets can often make a quick buck by raising prices because the people that are looking to buy tickets right before a concert are far more likely to spend that money because they think this is their last chance to get seats. And they are right!
That’s why we like this one month after the approach to buying tickets. The math behind it seems really solid, and it makes sense when you look at it for a while. It is based heavily upon the psychology of those that are selling their tickets and the fear that they might not get a return on their investment, so they act early and they underprice.
Sold Out?
If the concert that you want to go to is sold out, don’t worry. In fact, this actually will help you get tickets! When tickets sell out, people are no longer able to take advantage of the deals that buying tickets directly from the source might bring, and they go online to buy tickets. And if this is the case, then you now have a huge audience of people looking to both buy and sell tickets to choose from.
So how does this help you? Now that tickets are sold out, people who have tickets might be worried that they will not make any money off of the ones that they had bought, but can now no longer use. They want to get rid of them quickly. And because it is early in the process, they are worried that if their tickets sit too long, they never will sell. So they lower their prices, and you benefit! The same math that was used to support the one-month waiting period before buying concert tickets online also stated that tickets were cheaper at this time if the show was sold out, too.
If you look at a huge show like Coachella (https://www.coachella.com/), they found that tickets were actually at their cheapest 4 to 5 weeks after it was announced that the show had sold out. Psychology is a strange thing sometimes, but if you use it to your advantage here, you can save a lot of cash.
Not all events sell out, though. Because of this, this strategy isn’t always the most effective tool. Again, it’s really only for big-name events.
When Should I Sell Tickets?
If you’re one of the people looking for the best time to sell your concert tickets, we recommend putting them up about two weeks before the event. At this point, a lot of people know about the concert and they’re excited about it. They are likely to spend more too because they know that they missed their shot to grab tickets when they were first available. Yes, there is some danger in waiting this long, but if it’s a hot band, then you don’t really have much to worry about. People want to see the top bands play, even if they need to spend a little bit more. Depending on which site you go through, the pricing schemes will be a little different. Just be sure that you are getting a price returned to you that you’re happy with and that the price is stated before you finalize the posting of your tickets. There’s no guarantee that your tickets will sell, but most of the time they will for the bigger name acts.
