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 some good news for you.
On Thursday, the music streaming giant launched “Reserved by Spotify,” a new system where 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 tier and are over the age of 18 are eligible to be selected into the superfan category by Spotify. To prevent people from gaming the algorithm, the company is choosing not to share the details of just how that selection works, except that streams and shares definitely factor into it.
“But what we can say is that Reserved is designed to reward active fan engagement,” Spotify shared in a press release. The mysterious selection criteria undoubtedly sounds like a good way to increase engagement with the app, as real superfans will likely hit all the possible buttons to make sure they get selected into the pre-sale ticket pool.
Eligible superfans will receive notifications when they have ticket offers for upcoming concerts, with those offers also appearing across the app, including on Search and artists’ profile pages. Once you get an offer, you can click it to see which tour dates it is available and when your reserved ticket sales window will begin. Once the window opens, you will most likely have around a day to claim your ticket.
Ticket sales will be through Ticketmaster, and the feature will be limited to concerts hosted by entertainment conglomerate Live Nation, at least for now.
The ticketing industry is broken. Concert ticket prices are skyrocketing, pricing out many fans, while those willing to bear the cost often spend hours queued online to no avail as ticket resale bots crowd them out. The main culprit behind the situation the industry has found itself in, according to many critics, is Live Nation. That ultimately makes it kind of ironic that Spotify is choosing to partner up with them to solve the issue that, by all appearances, they helped create.
Live Nation owns hundreds of entertainment venues across North America, including most of the major amphitheaters, does the majority of promotions at those venues, and, through its subsidiary Ticketmaster, controls the majority of ticketing at those major venues. In a lawsuit opened against Live Nation in 2024, the Department of Justice 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 higher ticket prices for fans. Back in April, the jury in that case ruled against Live Nation, concluding that it had operated as a monopoly. The judge will now decide remedies, which 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 are to follow. The first artist to use the function is Role Model, who is going on tour this fall. Eligible superfans of Role Model will be able to book their tickets via Spotify on June 23, while the rest of us will sit back and watch whether Spotify’s experiment succeeds and sparks a change for the better.
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