If you regret the once simple, now increasingly impossible ordeal of buying concert tickets to see your favorite artists live, Spotify has good news for you.
On Thursday, the music streaming giant launched a new system called “Reserved by Spotify,” where the platform will reserve two tickets for each “superfan” of selected artists ahead of general tour ticket sales.
All Spotify users who pay for the premium level and are over 18 years of age are eligible to be selected as a superfan by Spotify. To prevent people from gaming the algorithm, the company chooses not to share details about how this option works, only that streams and shares definitely affect it.
“However, we can say that Reserved is designed to reward active fan engagement,” Spotify shared. press release. Mysterious selection criteria certainly sounds like a good way to increase engagement with the program, as real superfans will push all possible buttons to make sure they’re selected into the pre-sale ticket pool.
Eligible superfans will receive notifications when there are ticket offers for upcoming concerts, and these offers will appear in the app, including in Search and on artist profile pages. Once you’ve received an offer, you can click on it to see what tour dates it has available and when your reserved ticket sales window will start. Once the window opens, you’ll likely have a day to claim your ticket.
Tickets will be sold through Ticketmaster, and the feature will be limited, at least for now, to concerts organized by entertainment conglomerate Live Nation.
The ticketing industry is disrupted. Concert ticket prices rising into the airmany fans are priced out, while those willing to pay often spend hours in online queues as ticketing bots squeeze them out. According to many critics, Live Nation is to blame for the plight of the industry. Which ultimately makes it kind of ironic that Spotify would choose to partner with them to fix a problem they, by all appearances, helped create.
Live Nation owns hundreds of entertainment venues in North America, including the majority of major amphitheaters, conducts the majority of promotions at those venues, and controls the majority of ticket sales at those major venues through its subsidiary Ticketmaster. In a 2024 lawsuit filed against Live Nation, the Biden administration’s Justice Department alleged that the company used that power to lock artists and venues into long-term exclusive deals, one of the many consequences of which was higher ticket prices for fans. Back in April, a jury in that case ruled against Live Nation, finding that it operated as a monopoly. Now the judge will decide meansIt could also include forcing Live Nation to sell Ticketmaster.
The new feature is only available in the US for now, but Spotify says more markets will follow. The first artist to use the feature is Role Model, who is touring this fall. Eligible superfans of Role Model will be able to reserve their tickets via Spotify on June 23rd, while the rest of us will sit back and see if Spotify’s experiment is a success and a change for the better.
