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
Livestream more things and sell digital tickets. Doesn’t do anything directly, but acts as a substitute to shift demand away. Not much point in scalping tickets to a livestream unless the supply is limited, either by an artificial cap or technical constraints.
I'd rather them just go straight to lottery limited by government ID.
Spotify's solution can't remain completely anonymous because Spotify will need to limit botters and verify attendee identity at the door. So we're all just pretending that ID isn't involved, and there's no reason Spotify needs to be in the middle.
Spotify's solution obviously sucks for non-platform users, and if the implementation is "sort fans by listen hours in the last month to find true fans", it would also suck for fans who can't listen at work, fans who were on vacation, fans who don't like the latest album as much, etc. This is basically the modern equivalent of JPop/KPop acts putting concert lottery tickets in CDs and forcing a gross incentive on the fan.
Tickets can’t be resold. You can get a refund, but the ticket goes back to the vendor and the seat goes on sale through their site, with a randomized delay.
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.
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.
Actually the artists set aside tickets specifically for resale. At a company i worked at we did this on behalf of the artists and content-rightsholders directly to maximize their profit. Your favorite artist loves money and resale more than affordability
Isn't scalpers a solved problem with nominal tickets?
I'm pretty sure some bands were doing this a decade ago.
Even UEFA, among the most corrupt organizations in the world, does this for football tickets, you can buy 2 tickets and can change one name exactly once or sell them back to the organization.
At this point if you allow scalpers it's a decision not a technical problem.
This sounds like what fan clubs and artists run communities are built for.
Does Spotify putting itself as a middle-man help much, considering the artist has become a big enough operation to have to care about the issue in the first place ?
This would be a huge incentive for fans to use Spotify, because it would be like a lottery for tickets of your favorite bands, then that will be huge leverage for Spotify to slash artists' commissions further. This is vendor lock-in.
>But it should be pretty easy for Spotify to look for signals that indicate real human listeners
It's not easy. There's already a market for fake listens that require real looking accounts. That existing infrastructure can be directly reused to harvest these tickets.
A real fan who mostly listens on Bandcamp, buys vinyl, or discovered the artist through live shows may look less "real" than someone who passively streams them every day
Way back when I used Spotify, I felt they should go this way instead of dabbling with (fake) podcasts, pivot-to-video, audiobooks, and slop music. All of that stuff is a distraction from my core subscription model: listening to music from artists that I love, and finding new artists to love! Much better to lean into something complementary to that core model.
To keep the spammers out, limit the model to paid accounts. And just let Spotify provide the incredibly useful service of carving out a chunk of tickets for the biggest (Spotify) fans of every artist. It's hard to hate on it as someone who doesn't use Spotify -- after all, they're reserving tickets for proven fans. I hope Bandcamp and other streaming services do something similar so non-Spotify listeners can benefit and we can really squeeze the scalpers out.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
This 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
> Good for artists, fair from a market perspective
Bad for fans,
just because you can pick a solution that can extract the most amount of money from the thing, doesn't mean you're required to do so, (nor are you required to suggest it.)
Didn't you ever wonder why artists don't do that? Because they don't - at least not openly.
I think it's because extracting maximum value from your fans in the short term is not great if you want to have a musical career. The ones ending up with tickets will ideally, for themselves at least, be more or less indifferent to going to the concert: yes, they may get a lot out of it, but they also paid so much it was barely worth it.
Worst case, they will suffer from winner's curse, like auction winners often do: they won the auction because they were the ones who, more than everyone else, overestimated how much they'd get out of the concert.
Can you imagine the crowd mood if half the audience regrets spending so much money, and the other half is largely indifferent?
It's because artists dread this outcome that they hate scalpers, rather than becoming scalpers themselves.
It 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.
56 comments
[ 11.9 ms ] story [ 336 ms ] threadSpotify's solution can't remain completely anonymous because Spotify will need to limit botters and verify attendee identity at the door. So we're all just pretending that ID isn't involved, and there's no reason Spotify needs to be in the middle.
Spotify's solution obviously sucks for non-platform users, and if the implementation is "sort fans by listen hours in the last month to find true fans", it would also suck for fans who can't listen at work, fans who were on vacation, fans who don't like the latest album as much, etc. This is basically the modern equivalent of JPop/KPop acts putting concert lottery tickets in CDs and forcing a gross incentive on the fan.
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.
look at the monthly active users chart after this deal! promoted.
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.
You've just described a direct sale by the artist. These tickets always come with additional perks that you don't get buying normal tickets.
Resale would be someone buying those tickets then selling them again (hence the re in resale).
I'm pretty sure some bands were doing this a decade ago.
Even UEFA, among the most corrupt organizations in the world, does this for football tickets, you can buy 2 tickets and can change one name exactly once or sell them back to the organization.
At this point if you allow scalpers it's a decision not a technical problem.
Does Spotify putting itself as a middle-man help much, considering the artist has become a big enough operation to have to care about the issue in the first place ?
lower price /psa
It's not easy. There's already a market for fake listens that require real looking accounts. That existing infrastructure can be directly reused to harvest these tickets.
To keep the spammers out, limit the model to paid accounts. And just let Spotify provide the incredibly useful service of carving out a chunk of tickets for the biggest (Spotify) fans of every artist. It's hard to hate on it as someone who doesn't use Spotify -- after all, they're reserving tickets for proven fans. I hope Bandcamp and other streaming services do something similar so non-Spotify listeners can benefit and we can really squeeze the scalpers out.
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.
https://www.bassdrive.com/pop-up/
._.
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.
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.
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
Bad for fans,
just because you can pick a solution that can extract the most amount of money from the thing, doesn't mean you're required to do so, (nor are you required to suggest it.)
I think it's because extracting maximum value from your fans in the short term is not great if you want to have a musical career. The ones ending up with tickets will ideally, for themselves at least, be more or less indifferent to going to the concert: yes, they may get a lot out of it, but they also paid so much it was barely worth it.
Worst case, they will suffer from winner's curse, like auction winners often do: they won the auction because they were the ones who, more than everyone else, overestimated how much they'd get out of the concert.
Can you imagine the crowd mood if half the audience regrets spending so much money, and the other half is largely indifferent?
It's because artists dread this outcome that they hate scalpers, rather than becoming scalpers themselves.
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.