I seem to be out of the loop. As acts come through town, they all seem to have an internet presale a couple days before regular sale. Sometimes I can find them in a fatwallet thread, but most often I am out of luck, and I end up with crap seats one minute into regular ticket sale. If I use google, I get a bunch of sites that would be glad to sell me the code for $5.

So I ask again: Where can I reliably find internet presale codes?

I've gotten a couple by being on the band's email lists. Another place might be the band's fan club, especially if it's paid. Other codes might be reserved for sponsors or for contests/giveaways.

i would never pay (either directly through a site or through a fan club) to get an internet presale password code. What ticketmaster does is release x amount of seats for the presale. For example, for an arena show, they will have 500 tickets -- some floor, some lower deck and some upper deck. Once the good floor seats sell out, they move to the lower and so on. The thing is though, they only release some, not all. Your chances of getting shitty seats is still high. Once the real onsale date starts they release ALL the floor, ALL the lower, and ALL the upper. It is quite reasonable that people fighting for presale get shitty seats while people who wait for the real online sale get better seats without being a member of a fan club. If you need tix man, start reloading your page at 9:58 every 10 seconds. (if it is a 10 o clock on sale date).

Craigslist. That's where I got all mine for madonna.

I've done this before, but after 4 or 5 refreshes, Ticketmaster denies you access to their website.

What is really frustrating is that nowadays I am competing against 1000's of wannabe ticket brokers that jump on these ticket sales, and if they get the good seats, they immediately list them on Ebay.

Yeah that does suck...ebay isnt filled with people selling their seats due to an illness or some event they have to go to...its people from Atlanta or Houston selling U2 tix for Cleveland, etc etc

I am on the Jam Productions e-mail list, every week I get an e-mail with the presale codes for the coming weekend. Just this week they sent out the passwords for Gnarls Barkeley, James Blunt, and Evanescence (for their Chicago shows).

Might be something to look into.