Stern Grove Festival is one of San Francisco’s most popular events, with people clamoring to secure tickets to the free concert series every summer. While the concerts are some of the city’s most beloved events, many San Franciscans have expressed their frustration with the difficulty of securing free tickets, with online tickets regularly selling out almost immediately. In response, Stern Grove Festival has announced a new ticketing system for 2025 in an effort to make the tickets more accessible to the public.
“With demand for tickets growing every year, we wanted to make it easier and more equitable for all fans to experience Stern Grove Festival,” said Bob Fiedler, Executive Director of Stern Grove Festival, in a recent statement. “This new system ensures that everyone has a fair shot at attending their favorite shows—without the stress of racing to claim tickets online on the day that they were released. Now, people will have two weeks to apply at their leisure and then also other ways to obtain tickets if they don’t win the lottery.”
The new ticketing system includes several different ways to get your tickets:
- Lottery
- Community Box Office
- Volunteer with Stern Grove
- Partner/Community Ticket Giveaways
- Donate to reserve a Table or spot for your favorite concert
For lottery tickets, you have two weeks to enter the lottery for each show, and then it closes 4 weeks before the concert. The community boxes offer an opportunity to get a limited number of tickets in person a day before the event on a first-come-first-serve basis. If you’re feeling generous, you can reserve a donation table or a spot at a shared donation table.
Plus, the lineup for this year’s festival will drop soon, but we do have the dates for this year’s shows. The concerts start on June 15, 2025, and conclude on August 17, 2o25. Stay tuned for the lineup announcement to see what performers you can look forward to this year.