Developer API
Best Practices
Ticket Status
The Bandsintown API exposes ticket availability. Best practice is to include a "buy tickets" link alongside the display of any tour date. It is important to display this information only when tickets are actually available. This information can be seen in the event response in the "ticket_status" field.
<ticket_status>available</ticket_status>Location Formatting
When displaying event location the following formats should be used:
- "City, Region" - Within the United States
- "City, Country" - Outside the United States
Bandsintown uses ISO-3166-2 codes for regions within the US and FIPS 10-4 codes otherwise. The FIPS 10-4 codes should not be used as display text.
Targetting Buy Links
The ticket links for each event support the use of an "artist" param to ensure that the buy page is targetted for the artist passed. This param is not required but should be used whenever possible.
For example if there is an upcoming event for Jay-Z and Young Jeezy, if the user clicks on this event from Jay-Z's page, you would set the artist param to Jay-Z:
http://www.bandsintown.com/event/3196595/buy_tickets?artist=Jay-Z
If the user clicks on this event from Young Jeezy's page, you would set the artist param to Young Jeezy:
http://www.bandsintown.com/event/3196595/buy_tickets?artist=Young+Jeezy
This ensures that the buy page is targetted for the artist of interest.
Caching
Event data should be cached no longer than 1 day, after this the data must be re-requested. This is to ensure up to date information and to minimize the possibility of errors and broken links.
An alternative to re-requesting data each day and still keep your cache up to date is to use our daily event feed. This contains all events that have been created, updated and deleted in the last day. In order for this method of caching to work properly you must be storing the Bandsintown event IDs.
The following steps should be done daily to keep your cache up to date:
- Request the daily event feed
- Purge any events you have cached that have been deleted (status=deleted)
- Update events you have cached that have been updated (status=updated)
- Add any new events that have been created (status=new)
Mobile
Bandsintown offers mobile versions of artist, venue, and event pages. These pages will be rendered automatically when accessed from a mobile device, however if your app runs solely on mobile we suggest using the "m" subdomain to ensure the mobile versions of the pages are rendered.
Example:
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