Comment by crazygringo
3 days ago
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.
This sounds like what fan clubs and artists run communities are built for.
Does Spotify putting itself as a middle-man help much, considering the artist has become a big enough operation to have to care about the issue in the first place ?
In an ideal world, the artist's own mailing list or fan community would be the canonical place for this, because it's closer to a direct relationship
Subscribing to a mailing list is not a relationship at all.
I know areosmith, phish and the Dave Mathews band gave fan club members dibs on good tickets, though this was year ago. My friend was a huge phish fan and he’d always get a bunch of new years tickets in the 90s.
This already happens. Most artists I listen to have a mailing list presale, then a spotify / promoter / venue presale, and finally the open sale in that order.
Yeah but fan clubs and artist communities are trivial to join with just an email address. Scalpers can just have their accounts join them all.
The point of a listening history is that it's so, so, so much more work to generate one that has been active for years and looks genuine and each one can only focus on a few artists at a time.
Do you really want (would you even be able) to be engaged in a distinct fan club / community for every artist you listen to? I'm pretty average in how much music I listen to, and that'd probably be several dozens just for the "big" bands
So you aren't a "biggest fan" of _everything_ you listen to, that seems pretty much in line with the expected meaning.
1 reply →
If an artist is just someone you listen to, you're not the demographic for a feature like this. You can't have several dozens of favorite bands. The idea is to get tickets to the hardcore fans, not the casual listeners.
[dead]
> Does Spotify putting itself as a middle-man help much
Yes, with discovery and lowering the barrier to entry. There's quite a few bands I'd have considered joining their fan-club for if it was easy as clicking a button and not having to trust yet another third-party site.
Actually the artists set aside tickets specifically for resale. At a company i worked at we did this on behalf of the artists and content-rightsholders directly to maximize their profit. Your favorite artist loves money and resale more than affordability
How does resale help the artist? By inflating expectations for ticket prices for the next show?
If the artist sells them directly at the market price set by the resale auction, they get more than if they sell at face value.
2 replies →
That's not what a resale is.
You've just described a direct sale by the artist. These tickets always come with additional perks that you don't get buying normal tickets.
Resale would be someone buying those tickets then selling them again (hence the re in resale).
Isn't scalpers a solved problem with nominal tickets?
I'm pretty sure some bands were doing this a decade ago.
Even UEFA, among the most corrupt organizations in the world, does this for football tickets, you can buy 2 tickets and can change one name exactly once or sell them back to the organization.
At this point if you allow scalpers it's a decision not a technical problem.
> ...you can buy 2 tickets and can change one name exactly once...
Unless you're forced to buy exactly two tickets [0], I don't see how that prevents scalpers? Pay people 100% of their purchasing cost and -IDK- 5% of the scalping profit to use their name to purchase the ticket and hand over the creds to do the ticket owner reassignment.
[0] In which case, I suppose it's a huge "fuck you" to people who aren't particularly social.
1 ticket: you can only sell back, no name change. You’re solo, not going with anyone, this works.
2 tickets: you can either sell them both back, OR change ONLY one name once. This means you have the option of buying two tickets up front, before you lock-in your companion.
It works well, I’ve experienced this for festival tickets.
you can buy 1 ticket, but then you can't change the name.
It does not prevent scalpers altogether, but it makes it harder and less profitable.
Generally, people do not want to go to an event alone, you'd go with a friend, partner, spouse, whatever.
So the scalper's profitability calculation goes from "buy 10 tickets for 100$ and sell them at 10x price to anyone" to "buy 2 tickets and sell 1 of them at less than 10x to people who want to attend the event alone". The profitability went from 10000 to less than 80.
It helps make it difficult to do scalping at scale. They can't reliably sell seats next to people. Always having to pay people their cut to use their name means the refund mechanism is still costly to the scalper.
It doesn't have to be perfect to be effective.
I can’t imagine the overlap between football fans and people who like to attend football games alone is big enough to matter.
A real fan who mostly listens on Bandcamp, buys vinyl, or discovered the artist through live shows may look less "real" than someone who passively streams them every day
That will impact dozens of people.
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
You can also make non-transferable tickets. If it’s a decent discount for a specific intended person it makes sense.
The majority of concerts lack sufficient demand for scalpers to make money. It's only the Taylor Swifts and Beyonces whose ticket values exceed the sticker price.
"Stream fraud" is already a thing, so if anything this would make botting more profitable. Great synergy to be had here by fraudsters
Sounds like a good way to pump the numbers
there's always a criticism, something has to give.
lest you desire verifiable gov based ID tracking?
This would be a huge incentive for fans to use Spotify, because it would be like a lottery for tickets of your favorite bands, then that will be huge leverage for Spotify to slash artists' commissions further. This is vendor lock-in.
>But it should be pretty easy for Spotify to look for signals that indicate real human listeners
It's not easy. There's already a market for fake listens that require real looking accounts. That existing infrastructure can be directly reused to harvest these tickets.
Way back when I used Spotify, I felt they should go this way instead of dabbling with (fake) podcasts, pivot-to-video, audiobooks, and slop music. All of that stuff is a distraction from my core subscription model: listening to music from artists that I love, and finding new artists to love! Much better to lean into something complementary to that core model.
To keep the spammers out, limit the model to paid accounts. And just let Spotify provide the incredibly useful service of carving out a chunk of tickets for the biggest (Spotify) fans of every artist. It's hard to hate on it as someone who doesn't use Spotify -- after all, they're reserving tickets for proven fans. I hope Bandcamp and other streaming services do something similar so non-Spotify listeners can benefit and we can really squeeze the scalpers out.
> cheaper price
lower price /psa