How to Get Concert Ticket Alerts by Email: Tours and Presales

Ways to get an email when concert tickets go on sale

1. The ticket seller's own alerts: almost every ticket site has them. On Ticketmaster you sign in and mark artists, teams or venues as favorites. After that it emails you when one of them announces new shows and tickets. A show that isn't on sale yet also has a 'Set Reminder' button on its page. That one sends a text, not an email, one hour before the sale starts. Both are free. The catch is that a ticket site only tells you about the shows it sells, so a concert sold by another company never reaches you.
2. Free concert trackers: Bandsintown and Songkick are the two big ones. You follow artists by hand, or connect your music app and let it see who you listen to. When one of them announces a show near you, you get an email and a notification on your phone. The catch is 'near you'. Bandsintown sends its alerts to followers within 75 miles of the venue, and Songkick writes to people in that city. If you would travel for a show, nobody tells you. Songkick's email is also a daily digest, so the news can reach you the next day.
3. The artist's mailing list and presales: most artists have a mailing list on their website, and that's usually where presale codes are sent. Spotify also emails presale offers to people who follow an artist or listen to them a lot. For that you need 'Spotify News and Offers' switched on in your notification settings; you don't need Premium. This works well for the two or three artists you care about most. Past that it's a lot of lists, and a lot of email that isn't about tickets.
4. Resale alerts for sold-out shows: some resale sites tell you when a ticket turns up. On Twickets the price can't go above face value plus fees. You open the show's page, click 'Set up an alert', and get an email when someone lists a ticket. You can have up to 10 alerts, and the busiest shows sometimes don't allow them. SeatGeek has price alerts that tell you when prices for a show drop or rise. The catch is speed. A fairly priced ticket for a popular show can be gone in minutes, so the alert only helps if you see it right away.

A concert ticket alert in one sentence

Write it the way you'd tell a friend: 'email me when Coldplay announces a show in Amsterdam or Brussels, and tell me when tickets go on sale'. Name the artist and the cities you'd travel to. If the show is already announced, send the link and say what you're waiting for: the on-sale date, or tickets coming back after it sold out. It doesn't have to be a concert. A festival, a play, a match or a comedian works the same way. A real person reads it and sets it up. No account, no app, and nothing for you to maintain afterwards.

We check the public pages you would check yourself: the artist's tour page, the venue's calendar, the ticket seller's page for that show. We only write when something you asked about has changed. The letter says what changed: the new date and the venue, or the day and hour tickets go on sale, presale and general sale, as the page gives them. It ends with a link to the official page. Each piece of news is sent once.

There are things we don't do. We don't buy tickets, we don't wait in the queue for you, and we don't have presale codes. We can't see pages that need a login. Some ticket sites also block visitors like us. When that happens we watch the artist's and the venue's own pages instead. If we can't read any of them, the first letter tells you, and you pay nothing. We check on a schedule, so for resale tickets that go within minutes, the resale site's own alert is faster than we are. The first 7 days are free with no payment details; after that it's $5/month for that one alert, and it stops by itself if you don't subscribe. Reply once to stop.

Good to know about concert ticket alerts

The announcement, the presale and the general sale are three different moments, and they are usually not on the same day. Most alerts tell you about the first one. The one you can't miss is the sale. So when a tour is announced, find the on-sale time for your city and put it in your calendar. Presales come before the general sale. They are run by the artist, a fan club, a card company, Spotify or the venue. Ticketmaster's help page says it plainly: a code doesn't guarantee a ticket.

A sold-out show sometimes gets more tickets later. Ticketmaster's UK help pages explain why: as the date gets closer, the organizer or the venue may release tickets that were held back for the artist. And once the stage is built, the venue knows which extra seats it can sell. So if you really want to go, keep the alert running until the day of the show.

Be careful where you buy. When a show sells out, fake offers appear quickly. Buy from the official seller that the artist's or the venue's page links to, or from a resale site that caps the price. If a stranger offers you tickets in a comment or a private message, walk away.

Try it — hand us this sentence:

Common questions