How do concert presales work?

How do Live Nation presales work?

A Live Nation promoter presale is an early purchasing window available to an eligible list before the general sale. A code grants access to the window, not guaranteed inventory or a discount. The event organizer configures that show's availability and prices; there is no universal Live Nation presale allocation across tours.

What is a subscriber-only presale?

It is an advance window limited to qualifying subscribers, such as a venue or promoter mailing list. Subscription determines eligibility, not the number or price of tickets available. A specific show's organizer controls the inventory and schedule, so a subscriber may still find no tickets in that window.

What does promoter presale mean?

A promoter presale is an early access window shared through a promoter's audience or channel before the general on-sale. A code identifies eligibility for that window; it is not a promise of a ticket, a reserved share of all seats, or a discount. Ticketmaster's published presale guidance says codes do not guarantee availability. The organizer sets the offer and inventory for the specific show, which may differ between windows.

The angriest ticket-buying experiences follow the same shape: a fan waits for the announced on-sale, finds thin or expensive inventory within minutes, and concludes the game was rigged. Sometimes something improper happened; far more often, the house had simply been offered in stages the buyer never saw. Understanding those stages is the difference between diagnosing a market and merely resenting one.

The Event Organizer configures everything

Ticketmaster's help material is unusually plain about where decisions sit: the Event Organizer sets the face value of tickets, decides how many tickets to sell, and decides when to put them on sale — and ticket availability may differ between presales. The ticketing platform executes a configuration; the artist team, promoter and venue parties author it. That allocation of authorship matters for accountability, and it is stated by the platform itself, not inferred here.

The windows, in the order fans meet them

The sequence a buyer encounters usually runs: artist presale, then card or sponsor presales, then venue and promoter presales, then the general on-sale — with holds for production, artist guests and the house standing outside every public window. Each window is a defined group and a defined slice of inventory. None of the sources cited on this page states standard proportions for those slices, and Live Index accordingly publishes none: the timeline on this page allocates a hypothetical 10,000-seat room purely so the mechanics can be seen, and says so on its face.

Artist presale

The artist presale is opened to the artist's own audience — fan-club members, mailing-list subscribers, sometimes buyers who registered in advance — using a code or a verified account. It is normally the earliest public-facing window. Who qualifies, how many tickets each code can buy, and how much of the house is offered are all decisions of the artist team and the platform executing them. Two artists in the same building in the same month can run artist presales of very different sizes, and neither is deviating from a standard because there is none.

Card and sponsor presales

Card presales are opened to holders of a particular payment card under a sponsorship arrangement between the card issuer and a tour, promoter, venue or ticketing platform; sponsor presales work the same way for other commercial partners. The buyer's qualifying credential is the card or the partner's membership rather than fandom. The size of the allocation is a term of the sponsorship, which is a private commercial agreement, so it is not published and this page does not estimate it.

Venue and promoter presales

Venue presales go to the building's own list — members, subscribers, past buyers — and promoter presales to the promoter's list. These are usually the last windows before the general on-sale and are frequently smaller than the artist window, though nothing requires that. A buyer who lives in the market and follows the venue can often reach inventory through this window that the artist presale did not offer them.

Holds stand outside every window

Behind all of these sit ticket holds: blocks withheld from public sale for the artist, promoter, venue, sponsors, label and press, together with seats the production has not yet cleared. Holds are not a presale — nobody buys them during a presale — but they reduce what any window can offer, and they are the part of the allocation a buyer never sees. The inventory waterfall sets out how holds, kills and comps turn a room's capacity into its sellable count, and the hold guide explains why the same word means something different in the booking calendar.

The general on-sale

The general on-sale is the first window open to anyone without a code. What it offers is whatever the earlier windows and the holds have left, at whatever prices the Event Organizer has configured for that moment. Ticketmaster's material is explicit that availability can differ between windows; the general on-sale is one window among several, not the release of the whole house.

Inventory release after the on-sale

Inventory keeps moving after the on-sale. Presale tickets that were allocated but not sold return to public sale; the New York Attorney General's report records that, in the shows it examined, unsold presale allocations were reallocated to the initial public on-sale. Holds that go unused are released, often close to the show. Production holds — seats withheld until stage, mix position and sightlines are final — are released once the production plan is settled, which is why tickets can appear days before a show without any new seats existing. None of this is resale and none of it is new capacity; it is inventory that was on the manifest all along, moving from a withheld category into a sellable one.

There is no standard presale allocation

This is the point on which the page is most emphatic. No source cited here — the platform's own help material, the regulator's investigation, or any other — states a standard share of a house that goes to presales, to any particular presale, to holds, or to the general public. The tranche sizes in the illustrative timeline on this page (2,000 artist presale, 1,500 card and sponsor, 500 venue and promoter, 5,500 general on-sale, 500 holds in a hypothetical 10,000-seat room) are chosen so the mechanics can be seen. They are not typical, not recommended and not measured. Any figure a reader has encountered elsewhere as the usual presale share should be traced to a sample and a period before it is repeated.

The one measured sample, and its limits

The only public measurement of allocations Live Index is aware of is the New York Attorney General's 2016 report, which drew on allocation and distribution data produced by Live Nation and AEG for top-grossing concerts in New York State from 2012 to 2015. On average across that sample, the report found 46% of tickets sold to the general public, 16% held for artists, venues, promoters and sponsors, and 38% offered through presales, with holds ranging from at or below 5% on some shows to 29% on one. Those figures are reproduced on this page with their scope, and three limits travel with them. They describe the highest-grossing shows in one state in one four-year period, not concerts generally. They are averages across a sample whose named extremes were wide apart. And they are a decade old. The measured sample and the illustrative scenario on this page are different things, and the page keeps them apart deliberately: one is evidence that allocations exist and vary, the other is a teaching device.

Why “sold out” at the on-sale misleads

If earlier windows have absorbed most of the sellable house, the general on-sale can exhaust in minutes without any single actor behaving badly. The number that matters — how much inventory each window actually received for a given show — is precisely the number that is not published per show. That absence is the honest headline: fans are asked to judge a process whose key parameter is undisclosed. Where price movement across the sale window is the question, Live Index's ticket price lifecycle framework treats it directly.

Are presale tickets cheaper? The sources do not say so

A widespread belief holds that presales offer better prices. Nothing in the material cited here supports that as a general rule: pricing is configured per show by the same Event Organizer that configures the windows, and a presale can carry identical, higher or lower prices than the on-sale. This page therefore makes no claim in either direction — an unknown stated as unknown, which is this publication's standing policy. The companion guide on presale pricing explains the fee and pricing mechanics that can make a presale ticket cost more.