Last year I tried to buy tickets to a Radiohead concert in Madison Square Garden. Eagerly waiting with six browser windows (three for each of their two dates), and a presale code, I quickly refreshed my browser and joined the digital ticket buying queue. Predictably both shows sold out and I failed to buy a ticket. Less than an hour later, tickets appear on secondary markets like StubHub at greatly marked up prices.

The ticket buying experience is stacked against fans as per TicketMaster’s former CEO explains:

• tickets are released to different groups at different times (fan presales, American Express card-holders, marketing agreements with say radio stations or promoters)
• artists deliberately hold back tickets to give to ticket brokers to sell on the secondary market because selling all the tickets at face value wouldn’t cover the artists’s guaranteed fee
• ticket-buying bots – Vice’s profile on Ken Lowson who ran the $25M ticket-scalping site Wiseguy which heavily utilised bots before being indicted by the FBI is a great read

So if fans are forced to pay premiums on the secondary market, when is the best time to buy? Chart-It suggests the best time to sell is 30-35 days before the event, and to buy 55 days before the day of the event or buy hours before the event if you’re comfortable with possibility of tickets selling out.

To help further examine this area, I created StubHubz to track and chart ticket prices on StubHub. While other secondary market sites or resellers exist, I looked at StubHub because they’re possibly the biggest secondary market for concert tickets (if not all tickets) and they have an API.

Right now it’s tracking a few events I picked for whatever reason. You can see how the prices (grouped by zone, e.g. general admission, balcony, suite) change over time as well as the average price, the number of tickets, and the number of StubHub listings.