Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Streams and share won't be fair metric

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

This is the problem with public listed companies that need to "maximize shareholder values" and look for infinite growth.

Another reason to use Bandcamp and just buy music. Of course then you've gotta setup a whole stack to store it, make it available to your devices, etc etc. I dunno, Spotify certainly isn't going to get better at this point. Best we can hope is that they die and something better takes their place.

I understand not wanting them to expand into playlists and audiobooks.

But concert tickets, notifications, etc., seems like a no-brainer. That is firmly within the category of music.

It also likely makes it harder for people ho are not users of Spotify to get tickets - which is almost certainly the goal.

I disagree; Spotify is good at serving up sound, so it makes sense for them to also serve audiobooks and podcasts; just like it makes sense for video streaming services to have both movies and tv shows. Similarly for concerts; people who listen to a lot of music are probably interested in going to see their favorite band live.

Mind you, I definitely have complaints about the app (like notifications interrupting music, their abysmal lock screen widget, and their "randomization" that always ends up playing the same few songs from a list of thousands); but I also understand why they want to expand.

At least concert tickets are somewhat aligned with listening to music, unlike autoplaying video podcasts on the homepage rather than showing my playlists.

You may need to move on to other services like Apple Music

It'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.

music listening has been falling for a while now. no company public or not will choose to commit suicide out of purity principle

I understand not wanting them to expand into playlists and audiobooks.

But concert tickets, notifications, etc., seems like a no-brainer. That is firmly within the category of music.

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

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

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.

Spotify is another entity dipping into the limited pool of available tickets and further limiting supply. I don't pay for/use Spotify and don't want to, so as far as I'm concerned this is only worsening the problem by further constraining the supply of tickets available to me.

Named tickets, like airplane seats?

Sorry, I only thought about this for 5 seconds, but there are markets where scalping doesn't cause issues. We could look at those.

This is ultimately a supply and demand problem. If tickets sell out on the secondary market for 10 or 100x the face value, then that's the fair market price. Either artists should charge more, or perform more shows.

I recently bought tickets to a concert in France (I live in Germany) and ended up not being able to travel and had to resell my tickets. Apparently according to French law you are not allowed to resell a ticket above its face value and so I had to resell it through the same ticketing company I bought it. They allowed me to set a price with up to a maximum amount which was less than how much I bought it (by a Euro or two) to cover their fees. It was also possible to name a specific buyer who would then get be able to buy your ticket.

Maybe there’s still another way for scalpels to game this system, I don’t know, but I’ve been to a few concerts in Paris and I’ve never seen scalpels hanging outside the venue selling tickets, which would be the norm in Germany, so maybe the system does work.

What should anything be done? If people are willing to pay five times face value for a ticket, then it signals that tickets are priced too low. Let the market price itself.

Harry Styles is playing in my city, he's apparently very popular, but there's still plenty of tickets available for as low as 47€ for tomorrow.

There are many solutions.

For example - allow ticket resale only through the official platform and cap it at the original sale price.

Another approach - check IDs at the door and only let the original ticket purchaser through.

The real problem is that scalping is insanely profitable for Ticketmaster & co. They take a cut of the original sale and every subsequent transfer, most of them at highly inflated prices, from both buyer and seller. Why would they give that up?

so they're partnering with Live Nation, the same company that's part of the vertically integrated monopoly on ticketing, venues, and resale. Nobody is buying these tickets for cash from a scalper outside of the venue. My 2-min tought: tie use of the ticket to the payment method or id of the purchaser; allow limited transfers. If LN/TM actually cared they'd provide for risk-free transfer without charging ridiculous mark-up. Since they sell the orginial ticket 95% of the time they have almost complete control over the pricing and consumer's id.

It's a bandaid and not a particularly good one. Spotify reserving a ticket allotment is really no different to American Express doing the exact same thing. Amex uses their allotment to attract premium members through concierge services. Spotify doesn't quite have this same upsell potential (yet?) but they're doing it to make money. We just don't know how that'll happen yet.

Defeating bot buyers, scalpers and resellers would actually be a noble goal but its' really the tip of the iceberg. If anyone was actually interested in tackling this (hint: they aren't) then you need to tackle a much bigger problem: the venue monopoly with Ticketmaster and Live Nation.

Many venus, particularly larger venues, have exclusive contracts with Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster also has an official platform for reselling tickets, of which they get a cut. In a more equitable world, you would only be able to resell tickets for their face value. It's alleged (and I believe this) that Ticketmaster only releases a tiny portion of tickets to the general public. The rest they have arrangements to sell through scalpers and resellers and their own platform because, hey, they make more profit that way.

There was a time when businesses were a tool to generate income. Small businesses still work this way. But any sufficiently sized company now is just a tool to speculate on and make a capital gain on. Ticketmaster doesn't need to grow into a trillion dollar company but they want to and, at a cewrtain point, the only way companies can continue to grow is by cutting costs and raising prices.

Back in the nascent days of Internet music piracy it was pointed out that almost no bands make enough money from selling music to live on. It's why the biggest anti-piracy advocates were huge bands like Metallica. Most bands make their living for performance fees ie playing concerts. And even then they might make barely enough to cover gas. What really gets them over the line is selling merch at the venues.

I'd say that music would be in a better state if bands could see more of the value of their labor from playing concerts. But even concerts aren't about bands or their fans anymore. They're about upselling premium services to high-net-worth clients. You ever notice that at sports venue, for example, general seating always gets mysteriously ripped out and replaced by suites? Same principle: venues make more per square foot from a corporate suite than they do from sports fans. There was a time when ordinary people would be fans of their home teams and just go to every home game. That's increasingly out of reach.

In short, the entire system is broken. Spotify participating in it won't change anything.

Make it illegal to sell tickets above face value.

Why is scalping a problem?

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.

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.

Competition in that space would be kinda good

I 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.

Spotify 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.

They'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.

Streams and share won't be fair metric

i think its totally fair.

You may need to move on to other services like Apple Music

It also likely makes it harder for people ho are not users of Spotify to get tickets - which is almost certainly the goal.

At least concert tickets are somewhat aligned with listening to music, unlike autoplaying video podcasts on the homepage rather than showing my playlists.

It'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.

In short, the entire system is broken. Spotify participating in it won't change anything.

> Of course then you've gotta setup a whole stack to store it, make it available to your devices, etc etc.

I have avoided building my own stack by uploading everything into Youtube Music (which used to be Google Music, which ... whatever.)

It gets a little worse every day, and one day it'll get bad enough where the pain of sysadmining something new will be preferable to them.

My impression from the selfhosted sub is that most people looking to replace spotify are not into albums, and want a lot of popular music not available on BC.

> Of course then you've gotta setup a whole stack to store it

No you do not. Just use an external drive and an MP3 player like some kind of caveman. There are plenty of high quality models out there. Additionally smart phones will let you store music on them to listen to using the player app of your choice (VLC or something).

music listening has been falling for a while now. no company public or not will choose to commit suicide out of purity principle

Spotify 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.

Named tickets, like airplane seats?

Sorry, I only thought about this for 5 seconds, but there are markets where scalping doesn't cause issues. We could look at those.

On the other hand, airplane ticketing is also notorious for stuff like overbooking flights with the assumption people won't show up and then in the rare circumstances where too many do show up, forcing people to give up their seats (in some cases even by force). I don't disagree with your thinking, but I'm hesitant to consider "what airplane tickets do" a good model for just about anything.

This is the answer, Ive seen it in practice. You just have to show id at the door when your ticket/QR gets scanned as normal, and the names have to match. Obviously only works for over 18 events though, unless you purposely sell under and over 18 tickets seperately.

Still have the issue of transferring tickets to friends or such if you can't make it. Axios and some providers handle this.

There are many solutions.

For example - allow ticket resale only through the official platform and cap it at the original sale price.

Another approach - check IDs at the door and only let the original ticket purchaser through.

What should anything be done? If people are willing to pay five times face value for a ticket, then it signals that tickets are priced too low. Let the market price itself.

Harry Styles is playing in my city, he's apparently very popular, but there's still plenty of tickets available for as low as 47€ for tomorrow.

Competition in that space would be kinda good

i think its totally fair.

The last/marginal ticket in the venue sells for 10x face value. The majority of tickets don’t sell for much more than face value.

Taylor Swift can’t realistically play more shows than she did during the Eras Tour, and it’s unlikely that she’d have sold a million seats in London if she were charging much more than she did.

I think its more complicated than that. An artist is pretty constrained by how many shows they can play in a given area which makes the total market for any given show really small and trivially manipulated for profit.

I assume the scalpers demand their additional payment first and upon receipt, name the buyer who can buy the ticket "for face value".

I have some tickets to big gigs coming up and they cannot be resold. On Ticketmaster.

I never understood the issue with scalping and reselling tickets for a higher price. At all. And I've read a bunch of opinions here and on other forums and articles. None make any sense to me. It's a good that's being resold for profit. Not an essential one like rare medicine during a pandemic.

I think some artists want to appeal to the poorer people so pricing their tickets higher or letting the free market work out the price would damage their reputation. So it doesn't seem to be a real problem we need to solve. It's a problem some artists feel they have. Let them figure it out.

If I was an artist and I expected a full venue with tickets that cost 10, I'd start selling them at 1000, then at 500, 200, 100, 50, 20 and finally 10. If someone buys all of them at 1000 and only that person shows up - awesome! Maybe there will be less drug sales because 1 person bought all tickets but that 100x per ticket could be used to pay the vendors.

New idea: You have to tie a valid credit card to a ticket in order to transfer it, if the card doesn't authorize for $500 at the gate, admission is denied, and the ticket can be used to charge unlimited concessions and merch to the original buyer's card. If a scalper sells a ticket to a stranger, the customer could bankrupt them at the show.

They'll trade off the inflated numbers for the royalties.

Why is scalping a problem?

Fewer 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.

Make it illegal to sell tickets above face value.

I 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.

How does this not just bias who gets ticket to those with more time preference.