This brilliant free app gets me tickets for sold-out gigs

As great as live music can be, getting tickets in the first place is far from straightforward. 

Even if you have access to an artist’s pre-sale, you’re often competing with tens of thousands of other people on a site that’s not used to those levels of traffic.

As a result, the most likely outcome is that you don’t get tickets. Or, you wait for ages in a queue, only to be told they’re sold out once you’re finally at the front. To say this experience is frustrating would be an understatement, but it’s happened to me on more than one occasion. 

However, all hope is not lost. If you’re prepared to be patient and then act fast, there is another way to secure totally legitimate tickets without breaking the bank. 

It’s known as Twickets, a free website and app available for both Android and iOS. As an authorised reseller in many countries (including the UK and US), it offers access to thousands of top live events. 

Traditionally, buying resale tickets involved paying a big premium – but not on Twickets. The company prides itself on being the only service in the UK that caps prices at face value. There is a 12% fee on top of that, but the total cost is still nowhere near as high as on many other resale sites. 

Once you sign up for an account, you can search for any event or tour and see if it’s covered by Twickets. If there are tickets available, you can buy them straight away, but that’s unlikely to be the case if it originally sold out. 

Instead, you can create alerts for any events that interest you. When a ticket that matches that description is listed, you’ll be notified immediately, via email, push notification or both.

Using this approach, I was able to get tickets to two top-quality concerts in London that I wouldn’t have been able to go to otherwise: Little Simz at Alexandra Palace and Laufey at the Royal Albert Hall. The latter was particularly surprising, given the high demand and smaller venue.

I’m not saying either was easy. On many occasions, I clicked the notification shortly after it was delivered, only to discover that someone else had already bought the tickets.  

To have a realistic chance, you need to start the buying process within seconds of the tickets becoming available. For a gig that you really want to attend, it can be tempting to wait next to your phone all day for a notification, especially as the number of listings tends to increase as the event approaches. 

But I don’t think this is a healthy approach. Instead, I only tried to get tickets if I happened to be available when the notification came through. As great as it is to see an artist you like, it’s not the be-all and end-all. 

As a fan-to-fan marketplace, Twickets is also my favourite place to sell tickets that I can no longer use.  

Creating a listing is straightforward and only takes a couple of minutes, although you’ll need to make sure that the company you bought tickets from allows them to be transferred. On one occasion, this required me to post a physical ticket rather than just send it digitally. 

If it’s a popular event, someone will usually buy the tickets within a few minutes of the listing going live. And once the purchase is complete, the funds will often arrive in your PayPal account on the same day, but Twickets says it’ll always be within 8 business days. There’s no charge to sell, and you can add up to 15% extra to cover the cost of the original booking fee.

Twickets doesn’t eliminate the stress of buying and selling tickets, but it does make it much more tolerable. If you miss out on the event you wanted first time around, give it a try and you might get lucky. 

Looking for a great camera phone to capture live music? I took one to a music festival and it didn’t let me down.

However, Android phones in general need to work on their video.