Concerts in a city on your exact dates: Songkick alternatives
Spotify's Live Events tab is the closest thing to a city-plus-dates search I found. As of September 2026 you tap the location filter at the top, type any town, and filter by dates or genres, and the list that comes back leans towards artists you already stream. Every other concert app is built around one home city and the bands you follow. So you stack them: Songkick's month page for the city, Bandsintown's Explore, Spotify with the town switched, the ticketing app that city runs on, then two or three venue calendars nobody aggregates.
Somebody put the question on r/solotravel in April 2023 and never got a clean answer. "Is there any way to see what concerts are on in a specific city during a specific dates?" The body of the post reads "Solo travelling in the summer (in Europe) and I really want to go see some concerts during my time abroad". Ten comments. The answers were Bandsintown, the Spotify tab and Google, which is roughly where this search still lands three years later.
Why the concert apps fight a trip-shaped question
Bandsintown's help centre states the ceiling in one line: "At this time you cannot receive notifications for multiple locations, your location can only be set to one city at a time." That page was last updated on 27 May 2021 and has not been revised since. The radius stops at 150 miles. Changing city means going into settings, the same screen that governs your alerts at home.
Songkick sorts a city by month. A trip running from a Monday to the following Tuesday straddles two lists, and you read both in full. Ticketmaster and DICE do have real date controls. Each of them also lists only what it sells, a much smaller slice of a city than the interface suggests.
The order I work through for a city
- Open Songkick's metro-area page for the city, then the month URL for your travel month. It is the fastest way to see whether the city runs a couple of dozen listings or a couple of hundred.
- Run the same city through Bandsintown's Explore instead of its location setting, so your home alerts stay put.
- In Spotify, go to Search then Live Events on mobile (Browse, then Browse all, then Live Events on desktop), change the town at the top, and filter by your dates. That path was current on 6 September 2026.
- Check the ticketing app the city runs on. DICE covers a lot of European cities, and Resident Advisor is the one for clubs.
- Finish with three or four venue websites and the city tourist board, the step that turns up what the aggregators missed.
What Songkick does and does not filter
Songkick is still free, still updated, and it changed hands last year. Warner Music Group sold it to the AI-music company Suno alongside their copyright settlement. TechCrunch, 25 November 2025: "WMG also announced that it has sold Songkick, a live music and concert-discovery platform, to Suno for an undisclosed amount." Suno is the name on both the Apple and the Google listing now. Version 11.3.0 on iOS went out on 19 August 2026, the Android build on 13 August 2026, and Play shows more than five million downloads.
The Lisbon metro page on 6 September 2026 offered these options under "Filter by date": All, Tonight, This weekend, This month, Oct, Nov, Dec, 2026, 2027. A month at a time. Lisbon carried 249 upcoming events and its October page carried 64, so a trip from 12 to 20 October means reading all 64 and throwing most of them away. That works. Songkick offers no range control anywhere on the page, only that list of nine options, and a range is what the r/solotravel thread asked for.
Tallinn showed 40 upcoming events on the same day Lisbon showed 249. Songkick indexes live music, so exhibitions, festivals and markets sit outside it entirely. A commenter in r/Concerts in June 2025 reckoned Facebook still beat every other source for gigs, and added: "By the time things like SongKick have surfaced some shows they're sold out."
Bandsintown, and the one-city ceiling
Bandsintown is the tool Reddit recommends most in these threads. It drew 68 upvotes in the big r/Concerts thread from June 2025, it has more than 10 million downloads on Android, and it shipped an update on 28 July 2026. The iOS listing says "It's completely free, with no hidden fees". The Play listing is flagged "Contains ads". Its App Store description carries the line "Continued use of GPS running in the background can dramatically decrease battery life."
Use Explore for the city you are visiting and leave your tracked location alone, because switching that setting rewires your alerts at home for the sake of a nine-day trip. The listings have the same holes Songkick's do. A commenter in the r/Music thread from November 2023: "I do find they don't have every show listed."
What the ticket sellers cover
On ticketmaster.co.uk the filters read "All Dates", "Change date range" and "This Weekend". A range you set by hand. Then the country boundary shows up. The selector says "United Kingdom selected, change country", and a Lisbon concerts path on ticketmaster.com returned a 404 when I tried it on 6 September 2026. One country site at a time, and only inventory Ticketmaster sells.
DICE I reach for in European cities. Free, iOS 4.261.0 from 1 September 2026, more than five million Android downloads, all-in prices, and Date and Price filters on the browse page. Fetched from a European connection, though, dice.fm/browse geolocated me and opened on "Popular Events in Lille" without asking where I was going. Resident Advisor's RA Guide claims "Listings in 120+ countries" on its App Store page and covers electronic and club music. Excellent for Berlin. It will not have the chamber orchestra.
Eventim I could not check. The site timed out on 6 September 2026, so I am not going to describe filters I have not seen with my own eyes. If you are heading to Germany or Austria, that is the gap in this page.
The apps side by side
| App | What it actually does | Price (Sep 2026) | Platforms | Live location | The honest line |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Songkick | Concerts per metro area, filtered by month | Free, no in-app purchases | iOS, Android, web | No, city-based | The month view is the way in for a city you do not live in, and Tallinn only had 40 events on it. |
| Bandsintown | Artist tracking plus one saved city, Explore for others | Free, ads on the Play listing | iOS, Android, web | Background GPS on mobile | Most recommended tool in these threads. It misses shows and it tracks one city. |
| Spotify Live Events | Any city, filter by dates or genres | Free, inside the Spotify app | iOS, Android, desktop | No, you type the town | The only one that takes an arbitrary city plus a date range. Weighted to your listening. |
| Ticketmaster | Date-range search inside one country site | Free app | iOS, Android, web | Not used for search | Only what Ticketmaster sells, one country site at a time. |
| DICE | Browse one geolocated city, Date and Price filters | Free, all-in ticket prices | iOS, Android, web | Yes, browse geolocates | It shows what it tickets, in the cities where it operates. |
| RA Guide | Electronic and club listings, claims 120+ countries | Free | iOS, Android, web | No, city-based | The right tool for clubs and nothing else. |
| Will U Be There | City plus two dates, concerts and other events within 15 km | Free, no ads, no in-app purchases | iOS, Android | No, never | Trip-shaped, and non-music events too. Coverage varies by city, and it sells no tickets. |
The part no concert app covers
Someone asked r/AskEurope in October 2021 for "a website or app that allows me to see what cool or interesting shows (concerts, plays, comedy, etc) I could check out while I'm in town". Note the parenthesis. Every answer named a single city's tourist board: Cardiff got visitcardiff.com, Helsinki got myhelsinki.fi, and no answer in the thread covered two countries.
Tourist boards and city open-data portals publish free exhibitions, street markets, open-air festivals and municipal concerts that never reach a ticketing platform, because there is no ticket to sell.
Nobody aggregates them across borders.
I wrote up the wider version of this method in how to find out what's on in a city you're visiting, and the collapse of the old catch-all is covered in what to use now that Facebook Events is dead.
What Will U Be There does with a date range
I built Will U Be There around the trip. You add a city and two dates, and the app shows the concerts, exhibitions, festivals and markets inside those dates, within 15 km of where you are staying. Free events carry a flag. You can star anything, RSVP Going or Maybe, and see which friends are going. On 6 September 2026 the database held over 200,000 upcoming events from more than 360 named sources across 57 countries, and those sources are picked by hand: tourist boards, city open-data portals, opera houses, ticketing platforms.
It never receives your live location. There is no GPS in it at all. You type a city and two dates. That is the whole of what it knows about where you are, and the privacy page spells out the rest. Your friends do not need to be on it for the events half to work. When you do want them there, a group invite is one link, with no friend requests inside it. iPhone and Android. Free, no ads, no in-app purchases.
It does not sell tickets, so you still buy through DICE or the venue. Artist alerts are not in it either. If your question is "when is Fontaines D.C. next near me", Bandsintown is the better tool and I would say so. Coverage is uneven city to city, the same way Songkick's is, dense in some places and a handful of rows in others. App Store and Google Play if you want a look.
The step to keep, whatever else you use
In that r/Concerts thread from June 2025, 124 comments deep, the answers people upvoted were Bandsintown (68), following the bands on social media (55) and venue mailing lists (26). Two of those three are manual work you do yourself. Before a trip I open the four or five venues in that city I would plausibly go to, plus the tourist board, and read their own calendars against my dates.