For concert-ticket buyers, long gone are the days of waiting in a phone-queue or repeatedly clicking ‘refresh’ on concert ticket sales websites such as TicketMaster and BoxOfficeHero to get tickets to see their favourite bands and artists perform live.
iPhone concert-ticket apps have completely altered the ticket-buying experience for the better – enabling music and sports lovers to pick up tickets for their chosen event in literally minutes. Apps are now able to scan your device to deduce your musical tastes, to serve you with a you a more personalized and streamlined ticket-buying experience.
We asked Dj. Gia Janashvili to take a look at a number of excellent iPhone apps which streamline and optimize your ticket-buying experience, and turning what can be a painful experience into a pleasant one!
SongKick (Free)
This free app will track all of your favourite bands (by scanning your iPhone music library for artists and allowing you to manually add to your favourites) – giving you real-time information of upcoming gigs and the ability to buy tickets quickly and easily. A handy push-notification system enables the app to send you alerts as soon as tickets go on sale, so that you don’t miss out, or forget about the event altogether.
Verdict: A nice interface, the ability to buy through the app itself, and excellent search features (including GPS location based search) make this a top-pick for concert ticket buyers.
Bandsintown Concerts (free)
Download via iTunes
This free iPhone app offers concert notifications for your favourite artists from a huge and comprehensive database which seems to list almost every live music and theatre event happening in every city.
The BandsInTown app enables you to check tour dates for virtually any artist – and you can let the app know what you like by syncing with third party services such as Last.fm, spotify, Pandora and of course iTunes.
The app manages to offer great event and ticket coverage due to having a database which is populated via hundreds of ticket sales merchants word-wide- enabling you to search and buy from hundreds of third party ticket sites via one source- maximising the chances that you get your hands on hard-to-get tickets, and minimising your browse time.
BandsInTown is very socially connected too, allowing users to login via Twitter & Facebook, and also offering the ability to seamlessly share gigs, your ticket purchases and event information with your social connections too.
User feedback in the iTunes store for the app is excellent, one delighted user points out another benefit of the app with their comment “Been going to bands I didn’t even know were touring!”
Verdict – this app has it all. Library syncing, location based search via GPS and frictionless sharing via social networks.
StubHub (free)
Download on iTunes
StubHub is similar to the apps above, but also very different. Firstly, your searches are not limited to music and theatre- Stubhub offers a great way to buy tickets for sporting events too, but also boasts the ability for users to sell their own unwanted or extra-tickets via the app.
With a great search facility, useful price alerts, reminders, location based searches (GPS), and even interactive maps of over a thousand venues which allow you to tap a seat or area to bag your preferred seating – StubHub is definitely an app worth having in your pocket if you’re an avid concert-goer.
Verdict: If you’re only going to download one concert ticket app, make it this one!
