Will Glastonbury’s new queue system end the ticket-buying chaos?

Anyone who has tried to get tickets to the UK’s biggest music festival will know how stressful it can be. In recent years, Glastonbury has reliably sold out within hours of tickets going on sale as millions of people furiously refresh hundreds of laptops, phones and tablets in a desperate bid to be among the lucky few.

In an attempt to quell the chaos, Glastonbury has announced a change to the ticketing system ahead of this year’s sales later this month.

The automatic queuing system will be in place ahead of the coach ticket sale on 14 November and the general sale on 17 November.

This time, anyone who is already on the See Tickets webpage when the tickets go on sale will be randomly entered into a queue. From there, a progress bar will indicate how long before your opportunity to buy your tickets.

If you click on the page after the sale begins – at 6pm and 9am GMT respectively – then you will be added to the back of the queue.

As before, once you’re successfully through to the purchasing page, you can buy in groups of up to six tickets.

The system is a change from the previous where festival hopefuls had to log into the See Tickets page after the sale opened, refreshing routinely in the hope that they would be able to get through the deluge of other concurrent music fans to the purchasing page.

Now, the Glastonbury system is more akin to the ticketing queues used by other recent huge gigs from Taylor Swift and Oasis.

Previously, hopefuls would also set up multiple devices to try and get tickets to the festival. Ahead of this year’s sale, Glastonbury has warned that “running multiple devices or tabs simultaneously to attempt to access the website may lead to your IP address being blocked, preventing you from buying a ticket. The same applies to sharing cookies and QueueIDs.”

Their advice is to “stick to one tab/device per IP address and please do not refresh your page once you are in the queue.”

As before, Glastonbury has also got a registration system in place so that ticket hopefuls will have to have signed up ahead of the sale. Glastonbury tickets are tied to individuals with picture ID on them to ensure they aren’t resold by touts.

Registration for tickets closes on 11 November.

Once again, ticket prices have risen for the mega music and cultural arts festival. This year, the general sale tickets will cost attendees £373.50 (€454.50).

The hope is that this new system will make it easier and fairer for people to access the heavily oversubscribed festival. 2024’s offering was a jam-packed feast for the senses with highlight sets from huge stars like Dua Lipa.

Some dedicated attendees are concerned that this new system will disrupt their previously airtight set-ups with multiple devices logged on at 9am and huge group chats and shared spreadsheets organising ticket buying like they’re captaining a spaceship.

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But in an ideal world, this will streamline the route to successful ticket purchases and make it more accessible and fairly allocated among all trying to go.

Glastonbury will run 25-29 June 2025. No acts have been announced but whoever is topping the bill, this will be one of the hottest tickets of the summer.