Ticketmaster Find Tickets

Purpose

Given an artist, team, or show name (or any event keyword), return the upcoming Ticketmaster events as structured JSON — title, event ID, venue (name + city + state + country + lat/lon), event date, on-sale date + presale windows, sold-out / limited-availability / cancelled / postponed flags, and the canonical event URL. Read-only — never reserves seats, never enters the checkout / queue flow.

When to Use

• "Are there any Olivia Rodrigo concerts in the US?"
• "When does Coldplay play London next?"
• Daily watcher for an artist's tour announcement.
• Pre-filtering candidates before a price-watcher hands off to a checkout skill.
• Sports / theater fans — Lakers games, Hamilton tour dates — these are modeled as "artists" in the same endpoint.

Workflow

Ticketmaster's frontend pulls its event data from internal endpoints at www.ticketmaster.com/api/... that proxy the Discovery API behind a server-side OAuth handshake. One of those internal endpoints — the artist-events list — is unauthenticated from the public internet. It returns the exact JSON that powers the artist-page event grid: 20 events per page, no apikey, no cookies, no signed query. The only edge constraint is that Ticketmaster's anti-bot (Imperva-class, the Tm-Bl: 1 block service at epsf.ticketmaster.com) blocks every datacenter IP — including AWS, GCP, Azure — at the L7. Adding --proxies to a Browserbase Fetch call routes through a residential IP and the same URLs return 200 application/json. No browser session is required for the happy path.

1. Resolve name → artistId

There is no unauthenticated keyword-events endpoint. Resolve the name to a Ticketmaster artistId first by parsing the topSuggestions block out of the search-page server render:

NAME="Olivia Rodrigo"
HTML=$(browse cloud fetch "https://www.ticketmaster.com/search?q=$(printf %s "$NAME" | jq -sRr @uri)" --proxies | jq -r .content)
ARTIST_ID=$(python3 - <<'PY' "$NAME" <<<"$HTML"
import sys, json, re, unicodedata
name = sys.argv[1]
html = sys.stdin.read()
m = re.search(r'<script[^>]*id="__NEXT_DATA__"[^>]*>(.*?)</script>', html, re.S)
data = json.loads(m.group(1))
qs = data['props']['pageProps']['initialReduxState']['api']['queries']
ts_key = next(k for k in qs if k.startswith('topSuggestions('))
results = qs[ts_key]['data']['results']

def norm(s):
    return unicodedata.normalize('NFKD', s).encode('ascii','ignore').decode().lower().strip()

target = norm(name)
# Priority: exact name match w/ events > exact name match > any with events > first result
exact_with_events = [r for r in results if norm(r['title']) == target and (r.get('count') or 0) > 0]
exact_any        = [r for r in results if norm(r['title']) == target]
with_events      = [r for r in results if (r.get('count') or 0) > 0]
chosen = (exact_with_events or exact_any or with_events or results)[0]
print(re.search(r'/artist/(\d+)', chosen['url']).group(1))
PY
)

topSuggestions.results[] items include {title, url, count, image, category}. count is the upcoming-event total — 0 means no current tour and the resolver should usually skip it.

2. Fetch events

# US-only, sorted by date
browse cloud fetch "https://www.ticketmaster.com/api/search/events/artist/${ARTIST_ID}?page=0&countryCodes=US" --proxies \
  | jq -r .content | jq .

The response shape:

{
  "total": 95,
  "totalLocal": 0,
  "totalInternational": 0,
  "events": [ { ... 20 events ... } ]
}

Paginate by incrementing page=N until either events: [] is returned or you've collected total events (page size is fixed at 20).

3. Filter parameters

Accepted query-string parameters on /api/search/events/artist/{id} (verified 2026-05-17, all returned 200):

Unknown parameters are silently dropped — verify with a probe request before assuming.

4. Decode each event

The JSON is already named (unlike Craigslist's positional arrays). Useful fields per events[i]:

{
  "title": "Olivia Rodrigo: The Unraveled Tour",
  "id": "06006474F3F0AFBC",            // Ticketmaster eventId (use in canonical URL + checkout flows)
  "discoveryId": "vv1AkZkoVGkdSH1XH",  // Discovery API eventId (different namespace; required if you later call discovery.json/v2 with an apikey)
  "dates": {
    "startDate": "2026-09-25T23:30:00Z",
    "onsaleDate": "2026-05-07T15:00:00Z",
    "dateDisplay": "showDateTime",       // others: "showDate", "showTime", "tba"
    "spanMultipleDays": false
  },
  "presaleDates": [ { "name": "Artist Presale", "startDateTime": "...", "endDateTime": "..." } ],
  "venue": {
    "name": "PeoplesBank Arena", "city": "Hartford", "state": "CT",
    "countryCode": "US", "countryName": "United States",
    "addressLineOne": "...", "code": "06103",
    "latitude": 41.02, "longitude": -92.41,
    "url": "https://www.ticketmaster.com/.../venue/49371",
    "imageUrl": "https://s1.ticketm.net/dbimages/21716v.jpg"
  },
  "timeZone": "America/New_York",
  "cancelled": false, "postponed": false, "rescheduled": false, "tba": false,
  "soldOut": false, "limitedAvailability": false,
  "eventChangeStatus": "none",           // "rescheduled" | "cancelled" | "postponed" | "none"
  "ticketingStatus": "UNKNOWN",          // also: "ONSALE" | "OFFSALE"
  "partnerEvent": false, "isPartner": false,
  "virtual": false, "local": true, "sameRegion": false,
  "artists": [ {"name": "...", "url": "...", "imageUrls": {...}} ],
  "url": "https://www.ticketmaster.com/.../event/06006474F3F0AFBC",
  "majorCategory": "Music"
}

5. Browser fallback

If the JSON API is unreachable (regional block, rate-limit, or the response payload is missing a field you need), fall back to rendering the artist page itself with a Verified + proxied Browserbase session and reading the same JSON out of the page's __NEXT_DATA__ island — every field above is mirrored under initialReduxState.api.queries['artistEvents(...)'].

SID=$(browse cloud sessions create --keep-alive --verified --proxies --region us-west-2 | jq -r .id)
browse cloud browse --connect "$SID" open "https://www.ticketmaster.com/${SLUG}-tickets/artist/${ARTIST_ID}"
browse cloud browse --connect "$SID" wait load
browse cloud browse --connect "$SID" eval "JSON.parse(document.getElementById('__NEXT_DATA__').textContent).props.pageProps.initialReduxState.api.queries"
browse cloud sessions update "$SID" --status REQUEST_RELEASE

The browser path costs ~100× more wall-time and is only needed when (a) the IP-restricted Fetch path is throttled, or (b) you need a field the API strips that the page render does include — none observed during validation, but the recommendations() and artistEnhanced() queries that ship in the same __NEXT_DATA__ carry related-artist suggestions and richer media.

Site-Specific Gotchas

• Residential proxy mandatory on every request. Datacenter IPs (AWS, GCP, Azure) hit Ticketmaster's anti-bot wall on every URL — homepage, search, artist API, event pages. The block returns 403 with header Tm-Bl: 1 and the epsf.ticketmaster.com "Let's Get Your Identity Verified" HTML body. Confirmed 2026-05-17 from a us-west-2 AWS IP: browse cloud fetch <artist-api-url> without --proxies 403s even though the endpoint itself requires no authentication. Always pass --proxies to browse cloud fetch, and --proxies --verified to any browse cloud sessions create. Verified on its own is not enough — the IP is the discriminator.
• Event detail pages (/event/{id}) are blocked even with proxies. A browse cloud fetch --proxies to a real event URL consistently returns 401 Tm-Bl: 1, not 200. The artist-events JSON carries every field a discovery flow needs; treat event-detail HTML as gated. Don't waste turns retrying. Only the seat-map / availability / checkout endpoints behind the event page require an active reserve flow, and that's a separate skill anyway (out of scope — recommended_method for this skill is read-only discovery).
• The public Discovery API (app.ticketmaster.com/discovery/v2/events.json) requires an apikey. Calls without one return 401 {"errorcode":"steps.oauth.v2.FailedToResolveAPIKey"}. The internal proxy www.ticketmaster.com/api/search/events/artist/{id} is unauthenticated and returns the same data — prefer it. If you DO have a Consumer Key, the public Discovery API supports keyword search directly (?keyword=), which the internal proxy does not — that's the one case where the public API beats the internal one.
• Suggestion ordering is by upcoming-event count, not by name match. Searching "Beyonce" returns "JAŸ-Z" (4 upcoming events) first, with "Beyoncé" (0 events) second. Always sort topSuggestions.results[] by (1) accent-folded exact name match with count > 0, then (2) exact name match with any count, then (3) first result with count > 0, then (4) original order. Naïvely taking results[0] will hand you the wrong artist for any inactive name.
• topSuggestions.results[].count is the upcoming-event count. count: 0 ⇒ no current tour. Use this to short-circuit before calling the events endpoint.
• The keyword search-suggest endpoints /api/search/search-suggest and /api/search/top-suggestions return 404 from external clients. They're intra-Next-only and only accessible during SSR. The data is available — but only through the __NEXT_DATA__ of /search?q=.... Don't burn turns probing those URLs directly.
• Internal keyword-events and venue-events endpoints also 404 externally. /api/search/events?keyword=..., /api/search/events/keyword, /api/search/events/venue/{id}, /api/venue/{id}/info — all 404 with text/html. Only /api/search/events/artist/{id} is exposed.
• Pagination: 20 events per page, fixed. page=0 is first. Last page is partial. Querying page beyond ceil(total/20) returns events: [] (not 404). Stop when events.length === 0 OR when you've collected total items.
• Read total, totalLocal, totalInternational separately. total is the global event count (subject to countryCodes when supplied). totalLocal / totalInternational only populate when useLocationBoost=true is sent — otherwise both are 0 even when total is nonzero.
• Event status is split across multiple booleans. Surface all of: cancelled, postponed, rescheduled, tba, soldOut, limitedAvailability, and eventChangeStatus (which mirrors the first four into a single enum). soldOut: true ⇒ no GA tickets; limitedAvailability: true ⇒ partial; ticketingStatus: "OFFSALE" ⇒ tickets pulled for a non-status reason (often pre-on-sale state). Distinguish carefully before reporting "no tickets."
• isPartner: true ⇒ the listing lives on a partner site. The url may redirect to AXS, vivenu, or another partner outside Ticketmaster's checkout flow. Surface this flag so downstream automation routes correctly.
• Sports teams and theater shows are modeled as "artists." Lakers = artist/805962. Hamilton Touring = artist/2336213. Same resolution + events flow — no special-casing needed.
• distance=6214&distanceUnit=miles&region=200&useLocationBoost=false is the captured "give me everything, no IP scoping" preset from the artist page's default artistEvents() query. Include these when you want the full global event list regardless of the proxy exit IP's region.
• The discoveryId field is the Discovery API's eventId, distinct from id. If a downstream skill chains into the public Discovery API (e.g. to pull seatmap metadata with an apikey), it needs discoveryId, not id. Carry both through.

Expected Output

{
  "query": "Olivia Rodrigo",
  "artist": {
    "id": "2836194",
    "name": "Olivia Rodrigo",
    "url": "https://www.ticketmaster.com/olivia-rodrigo-tickets/artist/2836194",
    "category": "Pop"
  },
  "filters": { "countryCodes": "US", "page": 0 },
  "total": 95,
  "events": [
    {
      "id": "06006474F3F0AFBC",
      "discoveryId": "vv1AkZkoVGkdSH1XH",
      "title": "Olivia Rodrigo: The Unraveled Tour",
      "startDate": "2026-09-25T23:30:00Z",
      "onsaleDate": "2026-05-07T15:00:00Z",
      "presaleDates": [
        { "name": "Artist Presale", "startDateTime": "2026-05-05T15:00:00Z", "endDateTime": "2026-05-07T04:59:00Z" }
      ],
      "timeZone": "America/New_York",
      "venue": {
        "name": "PeoplesBank Arena",
        "city": "Hartford", "state": "CT",
        "countryCode": "US", "countryName": "United States",
        "lat": 41.7637, "lon": -72.6873,
        "url": "https://www.ticketmaster.com/.../venue/49371"
      },
      "url": "https://www.ticketmaster.com/.../event/06006474F3F0AFBC",
      "soldOut": false,
      "limitedAvailability": false,
      "cancelled": false,
      "postponed": false,
      "rescheduled": false,
      "tba": false,
      "ticketingStatus": "ONSALE",
      "isPartner": false,
      "majorCategory": "Music"
    }
  ]
}

Alternative outcome shapes:

// Artist found, no upcoming events
{ "query": "Coldplay", "artist": {"id":"806431","name":"Coldplay","url":"..."}, "total": 0, "events": [] }

// Keyword resolves to no artist with upcoming events AND no exact name match
{ "query": "asdkjasdkj", "artist": null, "total": 0, "events": [], "reason": "artist_not_found" }

// Multiple top-tier matches — surface candidates and let caller pick
{
  "query": "Beyonce",
  "artist": null,
  "candidates": [
    { "id": "894191", "name": "Beyoncé", "count": 0, "url": "..." },
    { "id": "781009", "name": "JAŸ-Z",   "count": 4, "url": "..." }
  ],
  "reason": "ambiguous_name"
}

// Anti-bot wall (datacenter IP, missing --proxies, or proxy pool exhausted)
{ "success": false, "reason": "anti_bot_blocked", "tm_bl": 1, "status_code": 403, "remediation": "Retry with --proxies, or rotate the Browserbase proxy pool." }