alt.hn

5/21/2026 at 4:26:58 PM

Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/music/music-industry-news/spotify-will-start-reserving-concert-tickets-for-superfans-1236603106/

by elffjs

5/21/2026 at 8:19:38 PM

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.

by browningstreet

5/21/2026 at 8:47:20 PM

Youtube Music is quite good for what you're describing.

by mtrovo

5/21/2026 at 8:38:36 PM

Pandora still exists and is quite good.

by Loughla

5/21/2026 at 6:45:31 PM

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.

by joshl32532

5/21/2026 at 7:23:51 PM

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.

by something765478

5/21/2026 at 8:46:24 PM

> I also understand why they want to expand

I'd have fewer complaints if I could hide the sections I'm not interested in (new releases, audiobooks, podcasts, concerts, etc...).

by criddell

5/21/2026 at 8:37:32 PM

I have definitely become informed of concerts I’ve then gone to by way of Spotify. They know everyone I listen to and are well suited to advertise the artists I’d actually like to see to me.

by ribosometronome

5/21/2026 at 8:19:13 PM

Glad I made a true(r) random playlist before they shut their API, which I figure killed those tools

Expand to all Google Play Music features pls Spotify (play counts & the impossible upload-your-own-music to Spotify’s cloud)

by Barbing

5/21/2026 at 6:56:09 PM

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.

by jmuguy

5/21/2026 at 7:07:01 PM

> 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.

by pavel_lishin

5/21/2026 at 8:26:47 PM

I haven't set up my own stack for music, so I'm just guessing tbh, but administering Jellyfin has been completely painless. Let Claude write a docker compose file, toss it on the server, haven't had to think about it again. I bet there's something equally good out there for music management.

by epiccoleman

5/21/2026 at 8:48:15 PM

>Of course then you've gotta...

What? Nearly all of my Bandcamp purchases, except the literal handful of physical-only purchases, are all available to stream to my heart's content via the Bandcamp app.

by jjulius

5/21/2026 at 7:11:07 PM

> 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).

by galleywest200

5/21/2026 at 8:14:46 PM

Well to elaborate on what I meant - Spotify makes it extremely easy to have access to your music everywhere. Once you get into (or back into) storing MP3s you have to solve that for whatever level of convenience you want. I have Plexamp and things setup myself but it does require some work.

by jmuguy

5/21/2026 at 6:59:10 PM

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.

by Semaphor

5/21/2026 at 7:21:08 PM

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.

by crazygringo

5/21/2026 at 7:58:36 PM

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

by cassianoleal

5/21/2026 at 7:19:05 PM

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

by rmccue

5/21/2026 at 6:52:15 PM

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

by electronsoup

5/21/2026 at 8:23:44 PM

Apple’s prioritization of Apple Music on their HomePod turns me off it a bit. Could help guide users more to alternatives but would reduce services sales.

Meh, I’m being kinda unfair b/c the experience is gonna be better. Shame Spotify forces streaming from phone (YouTube Music can run on HomePod itself like Apple Music). YouTube Music via HomePod might play the audio from a music video instead of playing the real song, so does make sense to shuttle normies to the Apple service, but guess I don’t find the situation perfect.

by Barbing

5/21/2026 at 6:46:54 PM

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.

by crooked-v

5/21/2026 at 6:48:36 PM

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

by dominotw

5/21/2026 at 6:56:50 PM

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.

by skeeter2020

5/21/2026 at 8:40:05 PM

its not garbage. podcasts is now major chunk of listening. so why not give ppl what they want. "one thing" is not just music. My own listening habits have shifted from music into podcasts.

by dominotw

5/21/2026 at 6:41:06 PM

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

by 827a

5/21/2026 at 8:22:11 PM

Go back to the old way. Get in line physically and go get the tickets. This is one of those "technology should help here but actually makes the problem worse in weird ways" type of situations.

Nine Inch Nails/Trent Reznor did this in 2018 and it was infinitely better (I also met a lot of people just standing in line—we recognized each other at the show later and ended up throwing each other around in the mosh pit—a great time) [1].

[1] https://www.nin.com/tickets2018/

by rglover

5/21/2026 at 8:36:10 PM

I like it. Your last bit is good marketing against those who think paying a linesitter / spot holder is all upside.

Also economics of paying linesitters make it relatively much less attractive than all-digital scalping. So I think you have a solid plan. Should greatly reduce scalping.

Reminds me of technologically-inclined woman who pointed out the flawed thinking behind a grocery store handing out first-gen iPads to their shelf stockers. “I love my iPad at home but this will cost them so much time compared to pen and paper.” (Gotta go find out whatever happened to putting an RFID tag in every product, maybe they needed to hit 1/10 of a cent instead of a penny or something)

by Barbing

5/21/2026 at 8:27:15 PM

That excludes all fans who don't live in big cities. A lot of people travel just to go to shows.

by carlosjobim

5/21/2026 at 8:44:36 PM

Some people drove in. A few hardcore fans came into town (Chicago) the night before and had tents set up. There were also people coordinating with friends who did live in/close to the city to get the tickets and pay them back later.

Overall, that was the last really "old world" experience I had that reminded me why technology isn't always the right solution to a problem. Since then it's felt like this [1].

[1] https://youtu.be/fnVQlwKAuLk?si=hVr30353SlKfnyRz&t=106

by rglover

5/21/2026 at 8:36:31 PM

> That excludes all fans who don't live in big cities. A lot of people travel just to go to shows.

Not really. The place that sells the tickets doesn't have to be the performance venue itself.

This sort of distribution was quite common pre-Internet. In theory it's even easier now, because so many of the venues have (unfortunately) consolidated under vertically integrated ownership (e.g. directly owned by Live Nation). Which incidentally, after scalping, is the biggest reason that ticket prices are so high in the first place.

by chimeracoder

5/21/2026 at 8:32:13 PM

Not really. In the past you could buy tickets in tonnes of places. Ticketmaster had physical 'stores' all over and most of the big music retailers also sold tickets. Admittedly these aren't widespread anymore which poses a problem. It's also a terrible solution because it excludes people with jobs.

by basisword

5/21/2026 at 8:45:55 PM

There used to be a Ticketmaster counter at the grocery store. You could buy groceries for the week and pick up tickets for a show at the same time.

It was a far more sane (and exciting) experience.

by rglover

5/21/2026 at 8:33:02 PM

FIFA’s solution seems reasonable. The tickets are auctioned. EDM festivals usually have an earlier round for people who attended previous iterations which is similar to this approach by Spotify.

One way is to run an auction and provide every attendee on site with a credit code they can apply to next year’s auction. That way you tip the scales slightly towards previous attendees in a way a scalper can’t reliably access.

Another way is to run separate auctions: one for previous attendees, one for fan club members, and one for GA.

The aversion to auctions transforms everything into a lottery but I can see why they do it. The event operator takes all the heat and the artist keeps much of the benefit.

by arjie

5/21/2026 at 8:36:56 PM

The only real solutions to scalping are to impact supply/demand by increasing supply (extra show in each city) or lower demand (raise prices). As a jazz fan I don’t know much about shows that sell out and attract scalpers, but I’m curious why the artists don’t double prices to cut out middlemen.

by aczerepinski

5/21/2026 at 8:44:30 PM

They would to multiple the prices multiple times to even discourage the middlemen, gentrifying at the same time the fan base, which is sad

by redoxate

5/21/2026 at 8:47:06 PM

It is, but it still feels better that the money goes toward the artist than it does to go to a middleman.

Reality is there is no good solution IMO, no matter what you do, someone is missing out. Just the reality of supply vs demand.

by cheeze

5/21/2026 at 7:10:51 PM

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.

by inkcapmushroom

5/21/2026 at 7:59:55 PM

Same here.

by cassianoleal

5/21/2026 at 6:44:50 PM

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.

by 317070

5/21/2026 at 6:49:22 PM

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.

by alt227

5/21/2026 at 7:38:24 PM

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.

by saghm

5/21/2026 at 8:39:56 PM

Concertgoer Bill of Rights - get bumped? Massive stipend, hotel room, free VIP ticket in future, & transportation+entry to a partner venue in the city with other music.

They haven’t all universally built in overbooking as a critical part of their competitive price structure or whatever, and we can stop it before it starts.

EU version for flights: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Passengers_Rights_Regulati...

by Barbing

5/21/2026 at 6:48:58 PM

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

by ZeWaka

5/21/2026 at 8:49:42 PM

[delayed]

by criddell

5/21/2026 at 7:24:29 PM

Anything requiring transferring "to friends" will be attempted to be used for scalping of course.

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.

by xp84

5/21/2026 at 7:40:56 PM

> 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.

My dad used to joke about how many signs he'd say at baseball games saying scalping is against the rules but somehow hearing loads of StubHub ads whenever he would listen to a game on the radio.

by saghm

5/21/2026 at 8:29:09 PM

If you "can't make it", you just have to eat the loss. True fans will make it.

by carlosjobim

5/21/2026 at 7:24:41 PM

Transferring tickets to friends is functionally indistinguishable from scalping

by bradleybuda

5/21/2026 at 6:50:55 PM

Would need to provide a decent refund system alongside named tickets, offering quick and easy refunds for maybe 10% cancellation fee.

by alt227

5/21/2026 at 7:05:21 PM

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.

by ch4s3

5/21/2026 at 7:21:09 PM

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.

by OtherShrezzing

5/21/2026 at 8:14:48 PM

It seems like you could sell tickets in tranches at tiered prices. It seems very tractable. I suspect artists don't want to look greedy by personally charging what fans are often willing to pay.

by ch4s3

5/21/2026 at 8:21:56 PM

> The last/marginal ticket in the venue sells for 10x face value.

That's only if the event sells out. The ticket should have sold for a higher price such that the demand was exactly the number of seats available.

by redox99

5/21/2026 at 7:18:45 PM

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.

by johnpaulkiser

5/21/2026 at 8:13:25 PM

Then she should charge more.

by ch4s3

5/21/2026 at 7:14:56 PM

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?

by paxys

5/21/2026 at 7:22:29 PM

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

by throw1234567891

5/21/2026 at 7:02:55 PM

Why should anything be done? If people are willing to pay five times the 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.

by lbreakjai

5/21/2026 at 7:42:41 PM

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.

by iamalizard

5/21/2026 at 8:29:13 PM

This would make sense if they were an airline and only need to maximise profits. An artist – even one who really wants to make as much money as they can – still needs to think about other things, like atmosphere (that gig with one very rich person won't be much fun), and happy fans. If she sells all tickets at $10k each then maybe she'd clear the market, but she'd piss off a lot of fans, so maybe there won't be as much demand next time.

by ascorbic

5/21/2026 at 8:20:35 PM

> Why should anything be done?

Because there is demand for it. A lot of people like going to live music and theatre events and scalpers make it more difficult and more expensive for them.

Why shouldn't anything be done? Because capitalism is God?

by mike-cardwell

5/21/2026 at 7:31:10 PM

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.

by UntitledNo4

5/21/2026 at 7:44:05 PM

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

by xp84

5/21/2026 at 8:32:14 PM

It's trivially easy for scalpers to game that system.

by carlosjobim

5/21/2026 at 8:17:47 PM

In the UK they're making it illegal to resell tickets for more than the original cost. That should deal with the majority of the problem.

by mike-cardwell

5/21/2026 at 7:01:23 PM

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.

by skeeter2020

5/21/2026 at 7:30:19 PM

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.

by xp84

5/21/2026 at 8:30:44 PM

Two options, both of which seem to work well in venues near me:

1. When an event sells out you can join the 'waitlist' and people can offer their tickets back to the ticket company who give the person at the top of the waitlist the opportunity to purchase. All at face value. Good for the artist too as there is less chance of empty seats when people can't make it.

2. QR code tickets that rotate meaning they can't be screenshotted and sold.

by basisword

5/21/2026 at 7:26:03 PM

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.

by jmyeet

5/21/2026 at 6:43:44 PM

Make it illegal to sell tickets above face value.

by badgersnake

5/21/2026 at 6:49:48 PM

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.

by KingFelix

5/21/2026 at 6:57:19 PM

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

by gtm1260

5/21/2026 at 7:22:32 PM

willingness to stand in line for a ticket probably correlates well with fandom

by johnpaulkiser

5/21/2026 at 7:27:07 PM

Standing in line is (today) a digital process that a scalper can trivially scale

by bradleybuda

5/21/2026 at 8:44:03 PM

Why bother if there’s no profit?

by badgersnake

5/21/2026 at 7:43:21 PM

It seems unlikely they'd continue to do do that if they weren't able to flip it at a higher price later

by saghm

5/21/2026 at 8:40:28 PM

X$ for the ticket plus a convenience fee/service fee for standing in line.

by alphager

5/21/2026 at 6:58:10 PM

Why is scalping a problem?

by kgwxd

5/21/2026 at 7:04:27 PM

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.

by arnvald

5/21/2026 at 7:29:13 PM

> Fewer people go to concerts

Scalpers don't buy tickets and not sell them. The most scalped concerts are obviously the most attended

> fans can’t afford the tickets

See above. I assume what you are upset about is that rich fans are the ones going.

> less connection with the artists, less interest in music overall

I think you need to explain your logic here.

by bradleybuda

5/21/2026 at 7:45:34 PM

If I bought 100 tickets, sold 20 of them at 10x the value I paid for them, and then ate the rest as a loss, I'm still making a tidy profit, and the artist/venue/etc. still make the same amount of money as if 100 individuals bought them and attended, but there are now 80 fewer people in the audience (edited to add: and potentially 80 people who could have afforded the original price but not the absurd upsell).

I don't have the data to say whether this happens or not (edited to add: and the numbers are obviously made up), but the logic is perfectly sound; nothing would stop it from happening today.

by saghm

5/21/2026 at 8:13:55 PM

> See above. I assume what you are upset about is that rich fans are the ones going.

I'm upset that artists make the tickets affordable for different groups, and their fans want to see the concert. You have 2 sides that are in agreement. Then there's a 3rd, independent side that decides to abuse the system to make profit, hurting 2 other sides.

Imagine that you pay road tax and the government builds highway. Everyone's happy. Now there's a militia that sets up checkpoints and takes a toll for driving on the highway. Unrelated 3rd party tries to benefit by abusing the system.

> Scalpers don't buy tickets and not sell them. The most scalped concerts are obviously the most attended

If you buy 100 tickets for $100 and sell them for $300 you need to sell only 34 tickets to break even. The concert hall could be sold out and half empty at the same time. Of course there are concerts where scalpers will sell 100% of what they got, but they don't need to.

by arnvald

5/21/2026 at 7:40:08 PM

Not OP but - I think one could make the case that if tickets were sold via a lottery and non-transferable, the average lottery participant would be a bigger fan of $ARTIST than the average person who can afford the scalped price for a ticket today.

Arguably if rich people are just buying the $1000 concert tickets just to flex and take pictures for IG, that's a seat that could be going to a 17-year-old who loves the band's music but can't afford more than $100. The 17-year-old meanwhile may never get to go to a show of any of their favorite bands due to this situation, meaning they miss out on this meaningful chance to connect with the music in a personal, in-person way.

Basically the case hinges on the assertion that the richest fans are not the same as the most serious fans.

by xp84

5/21/2026 at 6:54:04 PM

I’m against it from these angles:

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.

by dangus

5/21/2026 at 6:57:14 PM

You are just being punished for your poor judgement for not backing the winner. Not sure why you should be rewarded.

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

by ai-x

5/21/2026 at 7:07:46 PM

So your view is “accept a monopoly and become their bitch?”

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.

by dangus

5/21/2026 at 8:44:44 PM

Great, ticketmaster antitrust lawsuit round two.

by hmokiguess

5/21/2026 at 7:16:16 PM

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.

by 6thbit

5/21/2026 at 7:42:56 PM

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.

by xp84

5/21/2026 at 7:19:45 PM

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.

by crazygringo

5/21/2026 at 8:38:07 PM

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.

by Izikiel43

5/21/2026 at 7:31:45 PM

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

by tylergetsay

5/21/2026 at 6:32:37 PM

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

by boringg

5/21/2026 at 6:44:09 PM

Competition in that space would be kinda good

by whycome

5/21/2026 at 8:26:54 PM

I only listen to Global Electronic Music. All underground stuff, so im safe from the capitalists.

https://www.bassdrive.com/pop-up/

by Deprogrammer9

5/21/2026 at 8:28:45 PM

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.

by basisword

5/21/2026 at 8:40:23 PM

[dead]

by fatih-erikli-cg

5/21/2026 at 6:42:43 PM

Streams and share won't be fair metric

by maheenaslam

5/21/2026 at 6:50:00 PM

i think its totally fair.

by dominotw

5/21/2026 at 6:33:58 PM

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

by Aboutplants

5/21/2026 at 6:36:59 PM

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.

by 827a

5/21/2026 at 7:05:38 PM

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

by just_once

5/21/2026 at 6:55:36 PM

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.

by Aunche