Live data from Hacker News

Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans

hollywoodreporter.com

31–40 of 378 posts

Re: Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans

#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.

Re: Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans

#32
post #4

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

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.

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

Re: Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans

#33
post #22

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.

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.

> 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.

Re: Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans

#34
post #24
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 wa…

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.

Re: Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans

#35
post #5

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

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.

Re: Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans

#36
post #22

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.

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.

> 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).

Re: Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans

#37
post #5

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

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?

Re: Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans

#39
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.

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.

Re: Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans

#40

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.

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