For years, many concertgoers have voiced their frustration over how hard it is to get tickets to their favorite artists’ tours amid scalpers and soaring resale prices.
Now, Spotify says it’s launching a new program aimed at easing that problem for superfans of select artists.
The streaming giant announced the launch of “Reserved,” which identifies an artist’s most engaged listeners and reserves two seats for them at a show.
Spotify already offers presale access for fans of some top-streamed artists, but these tickets would be set aside for specific users rather than simply granting access to a presale queue.
“We’ll identify real fans based on factors like streams, shares, and other Spotify activity, and will also monitor the activity of Premium users to ensure these are real human fans and not bots,” the platform said in a statement Thursday.
Spotify says it won’t be adding any fees for its platform and the identified users will have a full day to buy the seats reserved for them.
If it sounds too good to be true, there are some restrictions.
To qualify for a reservation, fans have to be legal adults who use Spotify’s paid Premium service; also, the offers will be for shows in their local area. The reserved tickets won’t be a guarantee, the company noted, as there are “more superfans than there are seats available on a tour.”
The fan-engagement model is not dissimilar to one employed by Taylor Swift when she sold tickets to her 2018 “Reputation” stadium tour.
At the time, Swift used the Verified Fan system by Ticketmaster but offered fans a chance to “boost” their place in the presale queue. Fans earned “boost” opportunities through streaming her music, watching videos, purchasing merchandise from her store and engaging in her social media.
Many of Swift’s fans online expressed hopes that she would bring back the system following a disastrous Ticketmaster experience when her “Eras Tour” Verified Fan presale saw overwhelming demand in 2022.
Spotify’s announcement comes amid concerns for the live entertainment business, as many bemoan exorbitant ticket prices, resellers and a monopoly of the market by Ticketmaster.
Live Nation, Ticketmaster’s parent company, recently settled an antitrust case with the Justice Department. The government had accused the company of engaging in “anticompetitive conduct” that allowed it to charge more in fees as artists and venues had limited choices for ticketing services.
The settlement is expected to drive down prices and offer more choices as Ticketmaster agreed to provide a stand-alone ticketing system that will allow third-party companies like SeatGeek and StubHub to offer primary tickets through the platform.
Service fees will be capped at 15%, Ticketmaster will divest up to 13 amphitheaters and it will reserve 50% of tickets for nonexclusive venues, according to a senior justice official.
In addition to the difficulty of getting tickets, fans are facing sticker shock from both face-value and resale prices.
Artists such as Harry Styles, Oasis and Ed Sheeran have canceled tickets associated with scalpers to offer them to fans at a fair price in a fight against the resellers.
Even face-value prices can be too high for many fans, experts recently told NBC News.
Ticketing platforms such as Ticketmaster allow people to see unsold tickets as “blue dots” available for purchase, and experts have attributed “blue dot fever” for a wave of concert cancellations, even if artists won’t admit it.
But the Pussycat Dolls were open with fans about it being an issue when they canceled the U.S. leg of their reunion tour earlier this month. Fans who had purchased tickets were given a refund through the ticketing platforms.
“After taking an honest look at the North American run, we’ve made the difficult and heartbreaking decision to cancel all but one of the North America dates,” the group said in a statement.
