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Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans

hollywoodreporter.com

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Re: Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans

#181

Auction. Auction is the answer. Or, when a tour is announced, start tickets at 10X the regular price and have it drop down to the regular price over the course of a couple of weeks in a simple time based mechanism. After that, if tickets are not sold out it continues to drop until sold or it hits a reserve price for Door tickets. Good for artists, fair from a market perspective and gets rid of scalpers

Not good for fans. And happy fans are good for artist. So not good for artist.

Re: Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans

#182
post #14
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

[dead]

Re: Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans

#185
post #31
post #5

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

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.

No, it‘s an audience/artist experience problem. I worked for one of Australia's biggest outdoor summer music festivals through the 2000s (I built a direct ticket selling platform for them). Their popularity grew each year, and, sure, they could have just raised their prices to try and match supply and demand. They 100% did not want to do that because they knew it would completely change the audience demographics and make a less fun event for everyone to attend and a less fun event for the artists to perform at, thus making it harder to attract audiences and artists in future years.

They ended up being acquired by a company that was much more into charging top dollar to big-spenders. The company was ultimately acquired by Live Nation and the ticket prices kept increasing until suddenly ticket sales stopped, and that whole category of festivals is now largely dead in Australia.

Re: Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans

#186
post #5

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

I'm a perfect world, artists would rent a facility and sell/resell their own tickets (or partner with a ticket processor that offers price caps on resales) thereby controlling the issuance and resale of tickets. In reality, the facilities often have their own deals with people like ticketmaster and the artist has no control. It works out for the artist because they lock in the msrp of every ticket and don't have to deal with demand. But it sucks for the fans. Capitalism.

Re: Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans

#187
post #179

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 sca…

seems like it would just get botted like anything else and also make it harder for fans of an artist who don't use spotify to get tickets

Surely this will get arbitraged like anything else, where fans who get picks will onsell tickets

Re: Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans

#188
post #31
post #5

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

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.

There is a physical limit to how many shows you can put on and the Economics 101 explanation of ticket pricing misses the part where the price of the ticket is a part of the whole image the musician is selling to the audiences.

Taylor Swift can probably still sell out if she raises the price ten fold, but what kind message does this send to her average listeners? What does it mean if the most popular popular musician of our times prices the populace out? You can of course dismiss the likely negative responses as emotional and irrational, but that's the whole deal with art and culture. You can't build a fan base without catering to their emotions.

And then on the other extreme of music you have people like Fugazi, whose low ticket pricing is very obviously a part of the band's entire artistic and ideological project.

If you want to see what happens when you apply supply and demand to ticket pricing, you can just look at your nearest big league sports team. The recent trend seems to be jacking up the prices as much as they can get away with and catering more and more to VIP guests who spend a fortune in one of those "hospitality" suites. Perhaps not a coincidence that less and less people, especially younger people, around me are casually into sports these days. They got told that they are not welcome in the corporate owned sports venue and they take their attention elsewhere, and all it's left are a dwindling set of diehard fans and C-suite people who are there not for sports but for overpriced steak dinners and are too nicely dressed to cheer for their home team.

Re: Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans

#189
post #155

I listen to all of my music via Navidrome. It sits in an S3 bucket that I rclone new albums to. For concerts, I built a PWA that pulls my Navidrome artists and queries the Ticketmaster API for shows that match within a 75 mile radius once a day. It displays them in a list with their name, the venue/location and a link to buy tickets.

[deleted]

Re: Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans

#190

Auction. Auction is the answer. Or, when a tour is announced, start tickets at 10X the regular price and have it drop down to the regular price over the course of a couple of weeks in a simple time based mechanism. After that, if tickets are not sold out it continues to drop until sold or it hits a reserve price for Door tickets. Good for artists, fair from a market perspective and gets rid of scalpers

The answer to what question?
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