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