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 above 18 years of age are eligible to be selected by Spotify in the Superfan category. To prevent people from playing games algorithmically, the company is choosing not to share the details of how it makes this selection, except to say that streams and shares certainly factor into it.
Spotify shared in a press release, “But what we can say is that Reserved is designed to reward active fan engagement.” The mysterious selection criteria undoubtedly seems like a good way to increase engagement with the app, as real superfans will press all possible buttons to ensure that they are selected in the pre-sale ticket pool.
Eligible Superfans will receive notifications when they have ticket offers for upcoming concerts, with those offers also appearing on the app, including in search and on artists’ profile pages. Once you find an offer, you can click on it to see what tour dates it is available on and when your reserved ticket sales window begins. Once the window opens, you will have about a day to claim your ticket.
Tickets will be sold through Ticketmaster, and the feature will be limited to concerts hosted by entertainment group Live Nation, at least for now.
The ticketing industry is broken. Concert ticket prices are skyrocketing, leaving many fans frustrated, while those willing to bear the cost often spend hours queuing online to no avail as ticket resale bots crowd them out. According to many critics, the main culprit behind the state the industry is in is Live Nation. Ultimately it’s kind of ironic that Spotify is choosing to partner with them to solve the problem they helped create.
Live Nation owns hundreds of entertainment venues throughout North America, including most of the major amphitheaters, runs 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 Justice Department under the Biden administration claimed that the company had used this power to lock artists and venues into long-term exclusionary contracts, one of the many consequences of which has been higher ticket prices for fans. In April, the jury in that case ruled against Live Nation and concluded that it had acted as a monopolist. 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 will follow. The first artist to use this function is Role Models, which is going on tour this autumn. Superfans worthy of role models will be able to book their tickets through Spotify on June 23, while the rest of us will sit back and watch whether Spotify’s experiment succeeds and heralds change for the better.
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