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.
Sorry, I only thought about this for 5 seconds, but there are markets where scalping doesn't cause issues. We could look at those.
I suppose if we're requiring showing ID to attend anyway, it's not a lot worse to add an online ID verification step in order to be allowed to be a "sender" in the transfer system, and an identity is only allowed to have like 5 distinct "friends" in a rolling 12-month window.
Part of me thinks that Ticketmaster/Live Nation probably makes so much money from their own in-house scalping operation that they don't want to fix any kind of scalping problems for fear they would be somehow obligated to not participate themselves.
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?
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.
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.
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.
1. I like live concerts but I don’t spend my days listening to a lot of music. I would be considered “not a fan” by these metrics.
2 The monopolistic aspect. I subscribe to a much smaller Spotify competitor, now I’m at a disadvantage.
3. I don’t consider scalping a problem. The market price is determined by demand. It’s also been a problem that has been solved by artist presales and fan club gates.
I also think that as a recognized monopoly Ticketmaster should have more limitations on its business model. For example, their compassion on resale tickets should be limited. At present, they are encouraged to double dip on fees by finding ways to send more tickets to the secondary market.
It's the same logic for de-googlers. You can't De-Google yourself and then bitch about some Google products work better on Google products.
If you are a proud edge-lord/hipster with your obscure choices, you should also learn to deal with consequences.
Scale brings advantages. You can't have it both ways
I use a competitor to Spotify because I like the other product better overall. It’s a better value and better suited to my needs. I never said I’m using something else just to stick it to Spotify or become an edgelord.
I’m perfectly happy to be “punished” by missing some concerts. I think you misunderstand my comment as complaining about the situation. I really don’t care that much, I just am giving my opinion that this is a system that doesn’t seem ideal to me.
Many artists are struggling to fill seats right now. The industry can have fun trying silly schemes like this while they cancel tours in oversized venues.
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.
look at the monthly active users chart after this deal! promoted.
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.
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.
But concert tickets, notifications, etc., seems like a no-brainer. That is firmly within the category of music.
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.
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).
> Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.