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Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans

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Re: Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans

#61
post #5

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

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…

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

Re: Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans

#62
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

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.

Re: Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans

#63

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.

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

Re: Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans

#64
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.

Same here.

Re: Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans

#65
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then she should charge more.

Re: Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans

#66
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

Re: Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans

#67
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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.

Re: Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans

#68
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans

#70

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.

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…

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)

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