How we know when tickets go on sale

WhenTickets tracks 136 ticket on-sales, ballots, members' windows and registration deadlines. 37 of them are confirmed by the venue. The rest are marked as estimates, and this page explains what that means before you plan anything around one.

Who publishes this

WhenTickets is run by Molecular Sound Group Ltd, an independent UK company. We sell no tickets, take no commission, and have no affiliation with any venue, promoter or ticketing platform on this site. Every listing links to the venue's own box office and nowhere else. Corrections and questions go to [email protected] and are usually live within a day.

Where a date comes from

Every night, a crawler reads the ticket and membership pages of the venues we track, along with festival sites and the pages where ballots are announced. When a page changes, the new text is compared against what it said before, and anything that looks like an on-sale date is extracted with the sentence it came from. Nothing reaches the site on the strength of the extraction alone: each date is stored with the exact quote from the source page, and the quote is what we check it against.

A date already published is re-read for four months after it appears, because an announced date moving is common and a stale date is worse than no date. When one moves, the change is recorded and the page shows the new date with the old one noted.

What the three labels mean

Confirmed at source means the venue has published this date on its own website and we hold the sentence that says so.

Likely means a credible third party has reported it and the venue has not published it yet. Treat it as a heads-up.

Our estimate, from last year means nobody has announced anything and we have worked out when it will probably happen from when the same thing went on sale last year. Most of this calendar is this, because most of the demand for this information exists in the months before anyone announces anything. It is a reason to be ready, not a date to book time off around.

Structured data, the machine-readable markup search engines and assistants read, is published only for confirmed public sales. We will not assert an estimate in a format that strips the hedge.

What happens when we are wrong

Of the estimated dates that have since passed, 26 of 32 turned out right, which is 81%. That number is published on the accuracy page and it includes the misses, with what we said and what happened, because a confidence label with no track record behind it is decoration.

What this is not

Not a ticket seller and not a resale site. Not a guarantee: a venue can move a date an hour before it opens and sometimes does. If a date here matters to you, the source link on every page goes to the page we read it from, and that page is the authority, not this one.

Using the data

The whole calendar is available as JSON and as calendar feeds you can subscribe to, free and without a key.