Review: Dice

DICE certainly seems to be making waves the gig ticket industry. After initially launching in London, the service has now launched in other cities including Manchester and Bristol. Rejoice!

The biggest drawing point of DICE for students will almost certainly be that the app charges no booking fees. The price you see is what you pay – much better than other ticketing platforms like Ticketmaster or Seetickets where by the time you have finished booking your tickets, you’ve had to pay a transaction fee, postage fee, credit card fee and generalripoff fee that together seem to cost as much as the ticket itself. A ticket to Beirut’s show at Albert Hall next February costs £22.50 through DICE, in contrast to £30.70 through Ticketmaster after all the fees have been added on. Once you’ve bought a ticket on the app, all you do is have to show your phone at the door.

Touts may soon be a thing of past too. The mobile-based platform is immune to touting robots that buy up the tickets as soon as they are released, so everyone has a fair chance in buying tickets to popular events. The excellent waitlist feature of DICE means if you want to sell a ticket to a gig you can no longer go to, you can sell your ticket to a fan on the waitlist for the actual price you bought it for, and buy one vice versa.

The simple and sexy interface of the platform itself is really nice to use too. It’s a tailored tool for finding up coming gigs in Manchester, and you can listen to songs by the artist from within the app. You can then use the app find a gig you want to go to and buy the tickets straight away. Forget about finding a band then looking up their tour schedule to see you have no chance to see them. The shows on the app are hand-curated by a dedicated team led by radio DJ Jen Long, so you know you are in good hands.

My only minor qualm with DICE is that you will no longer have a ticket stub to remember the gig by, as all the tickets are done through mobile. What music fan doesn’t like looking back through tickets of years gone by? But with more and more tickets going the way of simply printing out an email, maybe this is inevitable. Being able to use simply your mobile is pretty convenient too.

There are loads of great Manchester gigs upcoming on the DICE platform, including Savages, Kurt Vile, Disclosure, Alt-J, The Maccabees, Grimes, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, and Father John Misty.