Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans

boringg

the next ticketmaster... I really loathe what spotify has become

Aboutplants

So scalpers will use bots to generate listens and shares, boosting listens for Spotify, in order to gain access to premium tickets. They are just adding a “barrier” that only inflates their listen counts while probably making it worse on actual valid ticket purchasers. I don’t see how this works out as planned

827a

For those against this: I'm curious to hear your take on how you'd stop/mitigate scalping.

maheenaslam

Streams and share won't be fair metric

joshl32532

This is the problem with public listed companies that need to "maximize shareholder values" and look for infinite growth. I just want Spotify for music (playlist, recommendation, lossless audio). I don't need their podcast, audiobook, ChatGPT, concert tickets etc. This just makes their app bloated for features I will never use.

kgwxd

Why is scalping a problem?

6thbit

but of course! why wouldn't you encourage bot accounts listening every kind of artist to scalp tickets? look at the monthly active users chart after this deal! promoted.

crazygringo

Honestly, this could turn out to be a really great thing. When artists become popular, they often complain that the people they are making their music for, their biggest fans, tend to be the people least able to afford the concert tickets. The artists are often totally willing to set aside a chunk of tickets at a much cheaper price, but they need to be able to guarantee that these tickets aren't just purchased by scalpers and resold at the market price. So if you can actually tie ticket availability to genuine listening patterns of this artist over time, in a way that is very difficult to game, then this could be huge. Obviously you can worry about scalpers that will now try to open 1000 different Spotify accounts so that they can buy up 1000 tickets. But it should be pretty easy for Spotify to look for signals that indicate real human listeners, I would think.

tylergetsay

The music industry works the way it does because a large amount of people involved are effectively working for free. Promoters, photographers, DJs, interns, writers, assistants, even some artists early on accept low or unpaid work because the industry offers networking, access, drugs, etc

browningstreet

I’ve almost entirely given up on managing music. Just done with it. I listen to soma.fm and radioparadise.com .. I read one music magazine and listen to some of the music recommendations from there, but following any of it, over time, is a lost cause for me. I was just remarking to someone how music apps are the least interesting, personal, and innovative of all the things I live with. Examples: we still can’t manage playlists of albums, or down signal genres of music or even artists, or separate “calm” music for sleep from all the other generative playlist rankings they use. Apple Music is entirely useless to me since the only “for me” stuff they’ll generate is music for sleeping. As if I don’t do other things.

Deprogrammer9

I only listen to Global Electronic Music. All underground stuff, so im safe from the capitalists. https://www.bassdrive.com/pop-up/

basisword

What a braindead move. If you see people post their "wrapped" you notice quite a lot of people basically streaming a single artist 24 hours a day. So now you're encouraging people to become streaming bots. And you're taking tickets from fans who don't happen to use Spotify. Fuck Spotify.

Izikiel43

This is a nice feature to have, it already tells you if an artist you like is coming to your city, and redirects to Ticketmaster for tickets, but it doesn't have the data to know if you already bought a ticket, so it keeps pestering you. Also, some competition against Ticketmaster is welcomed.

hmokiguess

Great, ticketmaster antitrust lawsuit round two.

grougnax

Soon, you will have to justify hours of Spotify usage to be allowed to buy tickets for shows.

reactordev

This is my shocked face when Ticketmaster aka LiveNation aka StubHub aka Spotify’s ticket reserve system is again a monopoly. ._.

jlarocco

This is good to know. If they roll it out it like their other "features", it's going to reserve the tickets for you even if you don't want them. Or they're going to put it as a drop down from the "Repeat" button, or something stupid like that, to cause people to click it by accident. And when you disable it in the settings they'll stop, but only for 6 months when they cram it down your throat again in a new place in the UI. I secretly wish Spotify would fire their entire product and dev teams, allow third party clients again, and just focus their energy on increasing their catalog and paying artists more. I don't want to see lyrics, I don't want AI shuffling, I don't want videos, I don't want concert tickets.

cdrnsf

I listen to all of my music via Navidrome. It sits in an S3 bucket that I rclone new albums to. For concerts, I built a PWA that pulls my Navidrome artists and queries the Ticketmaster API for shows that match within a 75 mile radius once a day. It displays them in a list with their name, the venue/location and a link to buy tickets.

poly2it

How is this not just a "Spotify tax" on tickets? I don't use Spotify, and I don't want to, because it's obnoxious crippleware. Now Spotify will reserve tickets, forcing me to prove my loyalty to their platform for some reason, before attending a concert? This doesn't make any sense. And if Live Nation cares about selling to authentic people, why do they not just take the proplem into their own hands and go after the scrapers?

Aboutplants

Auction. Auction is the answer. Or, when a tour is announced, start tickets at 10X the regular price and have it drop down to the regular price over the course of a couple of weeks in a simple time based mechanism. After that, if tickets are not sold out it continues to drop until sold or it hits a reserve price for Door tickets. Good for artists, fair from a market perspective and gets rid of scalpers