What Everyone Needs to Know About Glastonbury Tickets

Once you have established roughly when the tickets will be going on sale you have to find out where you can buy your ticket from .

For any given festival there are a number of agencies that are allocated tickets to sell on behalf of the promoters. They sell these tickets at the face value plus a booking and processing fee which tends to be 5-10%. Knowing in advance who will be selling the tickets will give you a head start. Every year you will hear people say things like “I tried to get through for ages and by the time I did they’d sold out” and “I phoned up all morning but the number was always engaged”. The first lesson to learn is USE THE INTERNET! You are far more likely to secure tickets if you try online rather than on the phone. When you phone up the call centres, they work from the same database of tickets as the website does. Online systems this year will be more robust than ever before in order to cope with the demand created when festival tickets go onsale, so my advice would be to use the internet. Remember to make sure you use the fastest browser and have a fast connection

So the first step is to find out where to buy from. The agencies that will have the bulk of the tickets for the major festivals this year are:

• TicketMaster: Probably have the largest allocation for most and the site with the least chance of crashing, it is a pretty robust site with a good online queuing system. Good for all festival tickets.

• See Tickets: Not quite as robust and more likely to crash on you but easy to use. Normally when a big event goes onsale they implement a 2 page order process whereby you enter the number of tickets you want and put all of your details on the next page, which reduce the load on your server and means you can get in and out quickly. This site however does have the tendency to crash after you have entered your details, leaving you insure of whether you’ve got the tickets or not!

• Ticketline: Very likely to crash but a lesser known site so there is less demand

• Stargreen: (for V, Reading and Isle of Wight) These guys normally only have tickets for London events but also distribute tickets for the above festivals. The beauty of this site is that it isn’t that well known so getting in early will give you a good chance of getting tickets.

• Aloud.com: This site is powered by Ticketmaster, so you’re ultimately using the same backend system. Wait times on this site are likely to be just as long as on Ticketmaster but a god backup just in case.

• Lastminute.com: Very little known that Lastminute.com have tickets to all the major festivals. They often don’t put them on sale until after the official onsale time and normally still have tickets left after everyone else has sold out. (although this year they are powering NME tickets for the first time so will likely sell out much faster).

• NME Tickets: Now powered by Lastminute.com, however the lastminute site directly has a faster server so it’s probably better to go straight there

• Seatme/Keith Prowse – another lesser known site selling tickets to the major festivals, they only have a small allocation but as no one knows about them, the demand is much less. As of yet, I’m not totally sure what allocation they will have so it will be worth checking back.

• NEC Box Office (for V staffs) – The NEC have tickets every year for the V festival in Staffs that you can buy online or over the phone.

• Gigsinscotland (for T in the Park) – A good source for your T in the Park ticket. 30,000 T in the Park tickets were sold on the ‘early bird’ offer in 2006 so this will sell out Very quickly!

• Ticketzone (for Isle of Wight) – another little known agency that normally has Isle of Wight tickets.

As well as these, other local agents/record stores often have tickets allocated, so if you live locally, always worth checking the local outlets. Ticketmaster have outlets in selected HMV stores, theatres etc, and as a general rule, these ticket centres work from the same database of tickets as the websites and the phone agents. I’m sure you’ve also heard that Ticketmaster may be selling tickets throgh National Lotery machines, but we’ll have to wait and see what happens there!