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Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans
- boringg 4mo agothe next ticketmaster... I really loathe what spotify has become
- whycome 4mo agoCompetition in that space would be kinda good
- Aboutplants 4mo agoSo 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 4mo agoSpotify is actively incentivized to mitigate that, because they're forced to pay royalties on every stream. This is, at least, a better situation than with Ticketmaster, who is actively incentivized to get scalpers as many tickets as they can.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- just_once 4mo agoThey'll trade off the inflated numbers for the royalties.
- Aunche 4mo agoThey'd probably make this a feature for paying customers. I don't think the economics of scalping this at scale would make sense you're spending money for months and risk Spotify banning you if you get caught.
- 827a 4mo agoFor those against this: I'm curious to hear your take on how you'd stop/mitigate scalping.
- badgersnake 4mo agoMake it illegal to sell tickets above face value.
- KingFelix 4mo agoI was a big fan of what the Cure did, they played our town and they did not allow any tickets to be resold for anything above what they originally went for. Non-transferable I think? But you could resell them via ticketmaster maybe for facevalue? It was amazing, we sat on the ticketmaster page, refreshed over the course of a day and we got 8th row for I believe $75 - it was an amazing concert, and being able to pay a reasonable price for tickets like that was amazing.
- gtm1260 4mo agoHow does this not just bias who gets ticket to those with more time preference.
- johnpaulkiser 4mo agowillingness to stand in line for a ticket probably correlates well with fandom
- bradleybuda 4mo agoStanding in line is (today) a digital process that a scalper can trivially scale
- saghm 4mo agoIt seems unlikely they'd continue to do do that if they weren't able to flip it at a higher price later
- maheenaslam 4mo agoStreams and share won't be fair metric
- dominotw 4mo agoi think its totally fair.
- joshl32532 4mo agoThis 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.
- crooked-v 4mo agoIt's the newest version of Zawinski's Law of Software Envelopment: > Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
- dominotw 4mo agomusic listening has been falling for a while now. no company public or not will choose to commit suicide out of purity principle
- skeeter2020 4mo agoSpotify is welcome to go into all those other businesses, but why do they have to destroy their one valuable resource in an attempt to leverage it for all this other garbage? Doing one thing really good - so good that people will pay you for it - is not a "purity principle". It used to be the fundamental reason for existence for many companies.
- dominotw 4mo agoits not garbage. podcasts is now major chunk of listening. so why not give ppl what they want. "one thing" is not just music. My own listening habits have shifted from music into podcasts.
- electronsoup 4mo agoYou may need to move on to other services like Apple Music
- kgwxd 4mo agoWhy is scalping a problem?
- arnvald 4mo agoFewer people go to concerts, fans can’t afford the tickets, less connection with the artists, less interest in music overall. Artists lose, even if they get paid and all the tickets technically are sold out. Fans lose. The only people who win are scalpers who just abuse the system.
- bradleybuda 4mo ago> Fewer people go to concerts Scalpers don't buy tickets and not sell them. The most scalped concerts are obviously the most attended > fans can’t afford the tickets See above. I assume what you are upset about is that rich fans are the ones going. > less connection with the artists, less interest in music overall I think you need to explain your logic here.
- xp84 4mo agoNot OP but - I think one could make the case that if tickets were sold via a lottery and non-transferable, the average lottery participant would be a bigger fan of $ARTIST than the average person who can afford the scalped price for a ticket today. Arguably if rich people are just buying the $1000 concert tickets just to flex and take pictures for IG, that's a seat that could be going to a 17-year-old who loves the band's music but can't afford more than $100. The 17-year-old meanwhile may never get to go to a show of any of their favorite bands due to this situation, meaning they miss out on this meaningful chance to connect with the music in a personal, in-person way. Basically the case hinges on the assertion that the richest fans are not the same as the most serious fans.
- 9rx 4mo ago> The 17-year-old meanwhile may never get to go to a show of any of their favorite bands Back in my day 17-year-olds, especially those who would want to attend concerts, were interested in discovering music. Some of those discoveries would absolutely be artists selling out stadiums where tickets can sell for 10x face value, sure. But some of those discoveries were artists relegated to playing in dingy bars where a cover charge would be unthinkable. One might not have been able to see all of their favorite bands (i.e. the most famous among them), but seeing some of those artists would be quite realistic. Does what you are saying imply that music fans today have converged on listening only to a small group of superstars despite music discoverability never being easier?
- 6thbit 4mo agobut 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.
- xp84 4mo agoI was thinking the same thing. If there are very many seats available, it will probably be gamed by scalpers. If they are doing this, they should really do the math to try to make the expected ROI of an additional bot account doing 24/7 streaming, slightly below the cheapest Spotify subscription price.
- crazygringo 4mo agoHonestly, 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.
- ensen 4mo agoseems like it would just get botted like anything else and also make it harder for fans of an artist who don't use spotify to get tickets
- electronsoup 4mo agoSurely this will get arbitraged like anything else, where fans who get picks will onsell tickets
- linkregister 4mo agoThe majority of concerts lack sufficient demand for scalpers to make money. It's only the Taylor Swifts and Beyonces whose ticket values exceed the sticker price.
- appplication 4mo agoYou can also make non-transferable tickets. If it’s a decent discount for a specific intended person it makes sense.
- irjustin 4mo agothere's always a criticism, something has to give. lest you desire verifiable gov based ID tracking?
- tylergetsay 4mo agoThe 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
- rchaud 4mo agoThe music industry got rid of all that years ago when the big labels swallowed the small indies and imposed their corporate culture everywhere. There are no A&R men skulking through dive bars using drugs and girls to sign bands. The bands are now supposed to approach the labels with their Spotify listen counts and social media follower numbers ready. Rick Beato has a good video on why so many new generation superstars like Gracie Abrams are nepo babies who all the time and money in the world to chase music as a career.
- browningstreet 4mo agoI’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.
- Loughla 4mo agoPandora still exists and is quite good.
- thinkingtoilet 4mo agoI came back to Pandora recently and I think it has the best discovery out of any music platform. I don't pay extra to play what I want, I curate radio stations and it's been great. The only catch is you have to be diligent with your curation, because it starts to reach and while you may love song X from genre Y, the station is genre Z. If you're not careful every station will become a mix of everything.
- hardtke 4mo agoFormer Pandora employee. The music recommendation team was amazing when I worked there, and the use of global song frequency capping across seeds helps prevent too much repetition at a user level but I agree on the genre bleed. They may have changed it but the music recommender was an ensemble model that polled 30 or so distinct models that would provide their own next song recommendation. One of the last resort recommenders used only the music genome data for the song (no collaborative filtering).
- ramses0 4mo agoMy trick is to be liberal with downvotes and excruciatingly sparing with any thumbs up.
- Deprogrammer9 4mo agoI only listen to Global Electronic Music. All underground stuff, so im safe from the capitalists. https://www.bassdrive.com/pop-up/ https://www.bassdrive.com/pop-up/
- basisword 4mo agoWhat 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 4mo agoThis 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.
- fatih-erikli-cg 4mo ago[dead]
- hmokiguess 4mo agoGreat, ticketmaster antitrust lawsuit round two.
- grougnax 4mo agoSoon, you will have to justify hours of Spotify usage to be allowed to buy tickets for shows.
- boatloof 4mo agoI have a shirt from nine inch nails offered too the top % of listeners with a bunch of streaming stats on the back so we're almost there.
- reactordev 4mo agoThis is my shocked face when Ticketmaster aka LiveNation aka StubHub aka Spotify’s ticket reserve system is again a monopoly. ._.
- jlarocco 4mo agoThis 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 4mo agoI 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.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- poly2it 4mo agoHow 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 4mo agoAuction. 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
- pimlottc 4mo agoThis is basically what is already happening with dynamic pricing. Tickets are now most expensive at the original sale and get cheaper over time until sold
- phantomathkg 4mo agoGood for artist, bad for those fans who have shallow pocket.
- herrkanin 4mo agoNot good for fans. And happy fans are good for artist. So not good for artist.
- wat10000 4mo agoThe answer to what question?
- electronsoup 4mo agoSo now we need to run farms of spotify accounts playing songs to get our concert tickets?
- 46493168 4mo agoApple needs to get into this space QUICK. They just added concert dates in Apple Music. Let me buy tickets with Apple Pay from the app and it's over.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- seandoe 4mo agoIt seems like a step in the right direction to combat scalpers. I've wondered though... Why not have a non-transferrable ticket system? If you can't go then you return your tickets to the pool and if they sell you get your money back.
- samarthr1 4mo agoWhat seperates _your_ tickets from any other returned ticket? Wouldn't a proportional return not be better?
- ssl-3 4mo agoNon-transferable tickets suck for their own reasons. Someone in a group gets sick or otherwise can't make it? Their seat is now either empty, or their ticket goes back to the pool. They can't give that ticket to someone else. That's a big deal for a whole slew of reasons. Let's pick just one reason and run with it. Five 11-year-old-ish girls want to go see Olivia Rodrigo. These kids haven't ever even been inside an arena before and aren't experienced enough to go on their own, and the tickets are expensive. One of the moms of the group decides that she'll take them all. No problem, right? Except: This mom gets sick. She can't go. And she can't just give her ticket to one of the other moms or dads because it is non-transferable. And the kids still aren't big enough to turn loose in a crowd without an adult. The end result of this is stupid: "Sorry, kids. None of you get to go to the concert that you already have a ticket for. Life is hard."
- registeredcorn 4mo agoIf there were a caveat for something like that, like say, "adult supervision for minors is required. Transfer between legal guardians is permitted, provided they can prove ..." or some kind of language like that. Are there other common cases that would apply? I assume there are probably some other situations, but I can't think of what they might be. I also find it hard to understand why a little bit of leeway couldn't be baked into the language of the transferable nature under certain circumstances. Presumably the venue wants people to have a good time so they will want to come back again and again, right? Perhaps something as easy as "If one friend can't make it, you can give it to a different friend." Then, at the door, the guards can look at the ID of someone and ask basic questions; "What is (person)'s name? What town does (person) live in?" Etc.
- nomilk 4mo agoSo long as something can be bought for x and sold for y (where y>x) there'll be an economic incentive to do so. So instead of scalpers trying to simply get to the front of the queue, they'll be automating plays on spotify (hogging bandwidth, something spotify is already stingy with), and 'sharing' tracks with others, meaning it incentivises spam and fake activity. Probably not a big issue to be fair, and if it only works legitimately 10% of the time it's still a win. But if there's one company that can take a decent idea and execute poorly, it's Spotify.
- emsign 4mo agoJust another form of platform lock in.
- autumnstwilight 4mo agoDon't really get why people are saying letting ticket prices rise to the maximum of what the market will bear, even if it's unaffordable to most fans, is the only solution. I've been attending shows by a certain Japanese artist since 2009, and e-tickets have pretty much killed scalping without preventing transfer to a friend (though it is a bit more annoying to do). I suppose in theory some scalper somewhere could be demanding "venmo me $1000 in a separate transaction or I won't give you the ticket," but in practice it doesn't appear to be happening to any great extent, or to be a workable business model like standing outside the venue once was. I think it just feels a lot more of a scam-risk to the average person than meeting someone at the venue who is clearly holding a physical ticket. You don't have to 100% eliminate any possibility of scalping, just shrink the market enough to make it not worth the bother. (And I say this as someone who kinda liked the option to overpay for tickets if I missed out on getting them at face value).
- cedilla 4mo agoHow do these e-tickets work?
- porridgeraisin 4mo agoYour ticket is tied to a particular platforms app. And you have to transfer it to another mobile number which also has to be tied to that particular platform. Both of you need to click accept or whatever in your respective apps for the transfer to go through. Mobile number => single human has limited number of accounts and there is a limit to how many tickets an account can buy. So scalping does happen, but only a relatively small limited amount.
- dandaka 4mo agoI imagine the best distribution model like this. We split all tickets in 2 buckets 50/50: 1/ Sorted. Some buyers have priority. They can be sorted by price paid, by amount of minutes listened, depends on the sale. 2/ Random with KYC. Everyone has the same chance to purchase.
- snazarov92 4mo agoThat’s a very good idea! Spotify is moving in the right direction I think
- BrtByte 4mo agoIt feels like we're replacing one opaque system with another slightly more personalized opaque system
- kqr 4mo agoDoes this mean the non-reserved tickets will get scarcer and command a higher price?
- mosselman 4mo agoSo all that needs to happen now is that The Doors will do another tour and I am in!
- kittikitti 4mo agoHow many among us are superfans? I know of at least one artist that I am a superfan of, but these systems aren't built to detect us. The fandom's are filled with people who, in reality, hate the artist and just go to concerts for the clout. The type that are Reddit moderator's of artist's snark subreddit. Usually, they buy tickets with mommy and daddy's money. Spotify is using this to encourage this type of person, a chronically online hater who has too much money and influence, to increase their usage on their app. How many people will this actually help? I think the image people have in their minds of scalpers is flawed. It's often a coordinated and organized group of "fans" who buy these tickets for "themselves". They are the first one's to criticize scalpers and form the common idea of one (namely, not them, they are certainly not a scalper). The solution is to stop expecting so much from an artist. These tours and concerts literally shorten their life spans. Live events have lost the plot (the irony of everyone recording a live event). I no longer care about seeing an artist in person. I'm not in the stratospheric class that can do it, nor will I ever be, nor do I want to be associated with the typical concert goer. I think the better solution would be to create artist communities that are interested in their music. I would love to connect with people who do, but at the moment there are 0 practical options. I'm always stuck with snarky Redditor's who think it's weird that I actually like the music.
- gilbetron 4mo agoOk, random scalper prevention scheme: What's the difference between someone that wants to transfer their tickets from someone the know versus a scalper? Trust. So when you buy a ticket you put, say, $1000, in escrow. The tickets have your name and ID on them. You can transfer the ticket to someone else. However, after the concert, the $1000 gets returned to the final person named on the ticket. If the transfer is between trustworthy people, then the final ticket holder will give the money back to the original person. There is no incentive to transfer money to the scalper, however. (Especially if scalping is illegal). This doesn't eliminate scalping, but it significantly reduces it. Critique?
- gilbetron 4mo agoHmmm - I think the scalper just adds the escrow amount on to the cost as the purchaser will get it back at the end.
- hunter2_ 4mo agoThe problem is that it requires not only that the ticketed people (scalpers, show-goers) do something new to prevent scalping, but also that the ticketing people (ticketmaster, etc.) do something new to prevent scalping. We need a solution that demands only the former, not the latter, because the ticketing people have no incentive to eliminate scalping. It's good for them. It gets a little confusing because situations like TFA make it seem like the ticketers want to help, and while they might be interested in the goodwill of ensuring that some of the tickets sold go to known actual fans first, they definitely aren't interested in losing the "collect a fee multiple times" aspect of maximizing resale which includes zero-trust transactions.
- crazygringo 4mo agoScalpers will just add $1000 to the price of the ticket. And then you keep the $1000 that gets returned to you.
- icar 4mo agoI don't use Spotify. Will people that do and are fans of the same bands have priority over me?
- AussieWog93 4mo agoSo scalpers will just spin up bots to "listen" to and share links from popular artists?
- delicyu5 4mo agoThe music industry concentration had rarely benefit to more then a fist of artists and a bunch of shareholders