If you’ve been lamenting the once simple, now increasingly impossible ordeal of trying to buy concert tickets to see your favorite artists live, Spotify has good news for you.
On Thursday, the music streaming giant launched “Reserved by Spotify,” a new system in which the platform will reserve two tickets for each “superfan” of select artists before general tour ticket sales go live.
All Spotify users who pay for the Premium level and are over 18 years old are eligible to be selected by Spotify in the superfan category. To prevent people from gaming the algorithm, the company decides not to share the details of how that selection works, except that streams and shares definitely play a role.
“But what we can say is that Reserved is designed to reward active fan participation,” Spotify shared in a Press release. The mysterious selection criteria certainly sounds like a good way to increase engagement with the app, as true superfans will probably press every button possible to ensure they are selected into the pre-sale ticket pool.
Eligible superfans will receive notifications when they have ticket offers for upcoming concerts, and those offers will also appear in the app, including in Search and on artists’ profile pages. Once you receive an offer, you can click on it to see what tour dates are available and when the reserved ticket sales window will begin. Once the window opens, you’ll most likely have about a day to claim your ticket.
Ticket sales will be through Ticketmaster and the performance will be limited to concerts organized by entertainment conglomerate Live Nation, at least for now.
The ticket industry is bankrupt. Ticket prices for the concert are shootingexcluding many fans, while those willing to bear the cost often spend hours queuing online in vain as ticket scalping robots crowd them out. The main culprit for the situation the industry finds itself in, according to many critics, is Live Nation. Ultimately, that makes it a little ironic that Spotify would choose to partner with them to solve the problem that, by all appearances, they helped create.
Live Nation owns hundreds of entertainment venues throughout North America, including most major amphitheaters, conducts most promotions at those venues, and, through its subsidiary Ticketmaster, controls most of the ticket sales at those major venues. In a lawsuit filed against Live Nation in 2024, the Justice Department under the Biden administration claimed that the company used this power to lock artists and venues into long-term, exclusionary contracts, one of the many results of which has been raising ticket prices for fans. In April, the jury in that case ruled against Live Nation, concluding that it had operated as a monopoly. The judge will decide now remedieswhich could include forcing Live Nation to sell Ticketmaster.
The new feature is only available in the United States for now, but Spotify said more markets will follow. The first artist to use the feature is Role Model, who will go on tour this fall. Eligible Role Model superfans will be able to reserve their tickets through Spotify on June 23, while the rest of us will sit back and see if Spotify’s experiment is successful and creates change for the better.
