Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans

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 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.

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

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.

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.