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.
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 ?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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 doesn't have to be perfect to be effective.
lest you desire verifiable gov based ID tracking?
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.
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.
lower price /psa
I've wondered though... Why not have a non-transferrable ticket system? If you can't go then you return your tickets to the pool and if they sell you get your money back.
Someone in a group gets sick or otherwise can't make it? Their seat is now either empty, or their ticket goes back to the pool. They can't give that ticket to someone else.
That's a big deal for a whole slew of reasons. Let's pick just one reason and run with it.
Five 11-year-old-ish girls want to go see Olivia Rodrigo. These kids haven't ever even been inside an arena before and aren't experienced enough to go on their own, and the tickets are expensive. One of the moms of the group decides that she'll take them all. No problem, right?
Except: This mom gets sick. She can't go.
And she can't just give her ticket to one of the other moms or dads because it is non-transferable. And the kids still aren't big enough to turn loose in a crowd without an adult.
The end result of this is stupid: "Sorry, kids. None of you get to go to the concert that you already have a ticket for. Life is hard."
Also, solvable. Everyone needs an ID that matches ticket or to be accompanied by someone with an ID that matches a ticket purchased in the same transaction (cap number of non-ID tickets per ID ticket, don't let people appearing over 30 in on a non-ID ticket). Then, when buying tickets, allow specifying a named alternate for each ID ticket in case the person can't make it.
I can think of many other instances of other problems.
If you cannot do so, then you aren't really following along very well.
That honestly seems like a very pragmatic solution to me.
If for instance they allow reselling the ticket at the same price, processing fees could be exempted from that calculation. So charging the nominal price, but with enormous fees that go to the seller's pocket in a roundabout way will work.
If processing fees are caped, the seller can request payment through a middle item that is nominally valued the same as the ticket but can actually be paid for more.
Or the reseller will accept generous tips in exchange for the ticket at the nominal price. etc. etc.
As long as there's someone willing to pay, money will find the way to the reseller.
You still have no scalping, but you recover the ability to back out due to unforeseen events
Are there other common cases that would apply? I assume there are probably some other situations, but I can't think of what they might be. I also find it hard to understand why a little bit of leeway couldn't be baked into the language of the transferable nature under certain circumstances. Presumably the venue wants people to have a good time so they will want to come back again and again, right?
Perhaps something as easy as "If one friend can't make it, you can give it to a different friend." Then, at the door, the guards can look at the ID of someone and ask basic questions; "What is (person)'s name? What town does (person) live in?" Etc.
How do we even prove that the kids are kids? How do we prove that the kids even exist?
> or some kind of language like that.
There's nothing accomplished here but handwaving and added burden.
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> Perhaps something as easy as "If one friend can't make it, you can give it to a different friend." Then, at the door, the guards can look at the ID of someone and ask basic questions; "What is (person)'s name? What town does (person) live in?" Etc.
In this second scenario, scalping goes like this: "For sale: Two tickets to $hot_show. Entry instructions provided upon delivery."
And then the buyer buys the tickets at whatever that price is, and goes to the show. They give their ID, the "guards" ask them basic questions, and they answer those questions. After that, they get turned loose inside like every other concert-goer.
This is just handwaving and extra burden, as well.
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Unless... unless we make it totally Gestapo-like. Because the best part of going to see a show is the lengthy interrogation that happens beforehand. (If the goal is to make shows less popular, then this is a sure-fire way to improve that metric!)
It's not ideal, but it avoids the scalping that comes from more streamlined transfers; scalpers can't easily sell burner accounts if account creation needs a non-VoIP phone number or similar.
We can't assume anything, except this promotes a new friction.
But even then: So we're letting anyone in with a valid ticket-holding account on a pocket supercomputer, without verifying that they are who they say they are?
Great! This means that the scalpers have moved on from just selling tickets, and pivot over to selling entire ticket-holding accounts.
(This is just more theatrical burden.)
Non-transferable tickets are bound to a specific name iiuc.
> The end result of this is stupid: "Sorry, kids. None of you get to go to the concert that you already have a ticket for. Life is hard."
Life is hard and they missed Olivia Rodrigo. The kids will survive through it, I promise. It's life, they'll see another concert. Most children in the world do not go to see concerts at 11 either.
Or perhaps: The suffering is the point.
Copy! Over!
And nobody says that tickets must not be cancelable. Just no reselling on your own.
Wouldn't a proportional return not be better?
I suppose in theory some scalper somewhere could be demanding "venmo me $1000 in a separate transaction or I won't give you the ticket," but in practice it doesn't appear to be happening to any great extent, or to be a workable business model like standing outside the venue once was. I think it just feels a lot more of a scam-risk to the average person than meeting someone at the venue who is clearly holding a physical ticket. You don't have to 100% eliminate any possibility of scalping, just shrink the market enough to make it not worth the bother.
(And I say this as someone who kinda liked the option to overpay for tickets if I missed out on getting them at face value).
Mobile number => single human has limited number of accounts and there is a limit to how many tickets an account can buy.
So scalping does happen, but only a relatively small limited amount.
So instead of scalpers trying to simply get to the front of the queue, they'll be automating plays on spotify (hogging bandwidth, something spotify is already stingy with), and 'sharing' tracks with others, meaning it incentivises spam and fake activity.
Probably not a big issue to be fair, and if it only works legitimately 10% of the time it's still a win.
But if there's one company that can take a decent idea and execute poorly, it's Spotify.
1/ Sorted. Some buyers have priority. They can be sorted by price paid, by amount of minutes listened, depends on the sale.
2/ Random with KYC. Everyone has the same chance to purchase.
For example - allow ticket resale only through the official platform and cap it at the original sale price.
Another approach - check IDs at the door and only let the original ticket purchaser through.
The real problem is that scalping is insanely profitable for Ticketmaster & co. They take a cut of the original sale and every subsequent transfer, most of them at highly inflated prices, from both buyer and seller. Why would they give that up?
That obviously doesn’t work because money can still change hands outside the official platform, unless you mean resale to a random buyer selected by the platform, in which case the resale is not terribly different from a refund and restock for any event where scalping is a problem.
You simply can’t stop scalping if you allow resale. Heck, people even attempt to scalp things where there’s no official resale mechanism (e.g. I change my id at this second, you immediately change yours).
Nine Inch Nails/Trent Reznor did this in 2018 and it was infinitely better (I also met a lot of people just standing in line—we recognized each other at the show later and ended up throwing each other around in the mosh pit—a great time) [1].
Also economics of paying linesitters make it relatively much less attractive than all-digital scalping. So I think you have a solid plan. Should greatly reduce scalping.
Reminds me of technologically-inclined woman who pointed out the flawed thinking behind a grocery store handing out first-gen iPads to their shelf stockers. “I love my iPad at home but this will cost them so much time compared to pen and paper.” (Gotta go find out whatever happened to putting an RFID tag in every product, maybe they needed to hit 1/10 of a cent instead of a penny or something)
Above-face-value ticket resale is illegal here and it helps a lot. But you need to make sure this gets prosecuted hard.
Overall, that was the last really "old world" experience I had that reminded me why technology isn't always the right solution to a problem. Since then it's felt like this [1].
Not really. The place that sells the tickets doesn't have to be the performance venue itself.
This sort of distribution was quite common pre-Internet. In theory it's even easier now, because so many of the venues have (unfortunately) consolidated under vertically integrated ownership (e.g. directly owned by Live Nation). Which incidentally, after scalping, is the biggest reason that ticket prices are so high in the first place.
It's actually a lot easier, the scalper would just hand a wad of cash to the teller and walk away with a stack of tickets to resell.
Sorry, I only thought about this for 5 seconds, but there are markets where scalping doesn't cause issues. We could look at those.
They haven’t all universally built in overbooking as a critical part of their competitive price structure or whatever, and we can stop it before it starts.
EU version for flights: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Passengers_Rights_Regulati...
I suppose if we're requiring showing ID to attend anyway, it's not a lot worse to add an online ID verification step in order to be allowed to be a "sender" in the transfer system, and an identity is only allowed to have like 5 distinct "friends" in a rolling 12-month window.
Part of me thinks that Ticketmaster/Live Nation probably makes so much money from their own in-house scalping operation that they don't want to fix any kind of scalping problems for fear they would be somehow obligated to not participate themselves.
One way is to run an auction and provide every attendee on site with a credit code they can apply to next year’s auction. That way you tip the scales slightly towards previous attendees in a way a scalper can’t reliably access.
Another way is to run separate auctions: one for previous attendees, one for fan club members, and one for GA.
The aversion to auctions transforms everything into a lottery but I can see why they do it. The event operator takes all the heat and the artist keeps much of the benefit.
Defeating bot buyers, scalpers and resellers would actually be a noble goal but its' really the tip of the iceberg. If anyone was actually interested in tackling this (hint: they aren't) then you need to tackle a much bigger problem: the venue monopoly with Ticketmaster and Live Nation.
Many venus, particularly larger venues, have exclusive contracts with Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster also has an official platform for reselling tickets, of which they get a cut. In a more equitable world, you would only be able to resell tickets for their face value. It's alleged (and I believe this) that Ticketmaster only releases a tiny portion of tickets to the general public. The rest they have arrangements to sell through scalpers and resellers and their own platform because, hey, they make more profit that way.
There was a time when businesses were a tool to generate income. Small businesses still work this way. But any sufficiently sized company now is just a tool to speculate on and make a capital gain on. Ticketmaster doesn't need to grow into a trillion dollar company but they want to and, at a cewrtain point, the only way companies can continue to grow is by cutting costs and raising prices.
Back in the nascent days of Internet music piracy it was pointed out that almost no bands make enough money from selling music to live on. It's why the biggest anti-piracy advocates were huge bands like Metallica. Most bands make their living for performance fees ie playing concerts. And even then they might make barely enough to cover gas. What really gets them over the line is selling merch at the venues.
I'd say that music would be in a better state if bands could see more of the value of their labor from playing concerts. But even concerts aren't about bands or their fans anymore. They're about upselling premium services to high-net-worth clients. You ever notice that at sports venue, for example, general seating always gets mysteriously ripped out and replaced by suites? Same principle: venues make more per square foot from a corporate suite than they do from sports fans. There was a time when ordinary people would be fans of their home teams and just go to every home game. That's increasingly out of reach.
In short, the entire system is broken. Spotify participating in it won't change anything.
1. When an event sells out you can join the 'waitlist' and people can offer their tickets back to the ticket company who give the person at the top of the waitlist the opportunity to purchase. All at face value. Good for the artist too as there is less chance of empty seats when people can't make it.
2. QR code tickets that rotate meaning they can't be screenshotted and sold.
Spotify's solution can't remain completely anonymous because Spotify will need to limit botters and verify attendee identity at the door. So we're all just pretending that ID isn't involved, and there's no reason Spotify needs to be in the middle.
Spotify's solution obviously sucks for non-platform users, and if the implementation is "sort fans by listen hours in the last month to find true fans", it would also suck for fans who can't listen at work, fans who were on vacation, fans who don't like the latest album as much, etc. This is basically the modern equivalent of JPop/KPop acts putting concert lottery tickets in CDs and forcing a gross incentive on the fan.
Harry Styles is playing in my city, he's apparently very popular, but there's still plenty of tickets available for as low as 47€ for tomorrow.
For the same reason anything is ever done about anything -- because it upsets a large enough portion of your community.
I think some artists want to appeal to the poorer people so pricing their tickets higher or letting the free market work out the price would damage their reputation. So it doesn't seem to be a real problem we need to solve. It's a problem some artists feel they have. Let them figure it out.
If I was an artist and I expected a full venue with tickets that cost 10, I'd start selling them at 1000, then at 500, 200, 100, 50, 20 and finally 10. If someone buys all of them at 1000 and only that person shows up - awesome! Maybe there will be less drug sales because 1 person bought all tickets but that 100x per ticket could be used to pay the vendors.
As a side note, this notion that a phenomenon being the result of market forces means it is fair and has no issues seems to be a blinkered view of the world. Surely enjoying high quality art should be possible for a broad section of society?
It should be obvious we want a system that is optimally beneficial to artists and fans rather than middlemen.
Because there is demand for it. A lot of people like going to live music and theatre events and scalpers make it more difficult and more expensive for them.
Why shouldn't anything be done? Because capitalism is God?
Scalpers make it possible to get a ticket at market price, instead of maybe being able to get it for less and maybe not being able to get it at any price. It's not at all clear that the latter is better.
I'm absolutely not convinced that the problem is as widespread as people make it out to be, outside of a few big names or events.
> Why shouldn't anything be done? Because capitalism is God?
Because it's just the system manifesting itself. There are winners and losers, and the winners are usually those with the most money.
I really find it odd to see people being this vocal for Taylor Swift tickets or Pokemon cards. If I use my capital to buy ten houses to rent, then I'm an investor. If I use it to outbid a city for electricity to feed my data center, then I'm a captain of industry. But the shiny charmander card is where people draw the line?
Er, I don't feel like you're thinking of what "supply" means here. We can't clone humans (yet). How many times do you expect a singer to sing in each city in a tour?
That is essentially what they have done. Ticketmaster is basically "We take PR heat to make you more money".
Reality is there is no good solution IMO, no matter what you do, someone is missing out. Just the reality of supply vs demand.
Maybe there’s still another way for scalpels to game this system, I don’t know, but I’ve been to a few concerts in Paris and I’ve never seen scalpels hanging outside the venue selling tickets, which would be the norm in Germany, so maybe the system does work.
So if not seeing them there means the problem is solved, this problem is in fact easy to solve.
Non-transferable I think? But you could resell them via ticketmaster maybe for facevalue?
It was amazing, we sat on the ticketmaster page, refreshed over the course of a day and we got 8th row for I believe $75 - it was an amazing concert, and being able to pay a reasonable price for tickets like that was amazing.
Why should that lock me out of a reasonable reservation system?
We have a massive centralization problem in these industries and this doesn’t fix it.
1. I like live concerts but I don’t spend my days listening to a lot of music. I would be considered “not a fan” by these metrics.
2 The monopolistic aspect. I subscribe to a much smaller Spotify competitor, now I’m at a disadvantage.
3. I don’t consider scalping a problem. The market price is determined by demand. It’s also been a problem that has been solved by artist presales and fan club gates.
I also think that as a recognized monopoly Ticketmaster should have more limitations on its business model. For example, their compassion on resale tickets should be limited. At present, they are encouraged to double dip on fees by finding ways to send more tickets to the secondary market.
It's the same logic for de-googlers. You can't De-Google yourself and then bitch about some Google products work better on Google products.
If you are a proud edge-lord/hipster with your obscure choices, you should also learn to deal with consequences.
Scale brings advantages. You can't have it both ways
I use a competitor to Spotify because I like the other product better overall. It’s a better value and better suited to my needs. I never said I’m using something else just to stick it to Spotify or become an edgelord.
I’m perfectly happy to be “punished” by missing some concerts. I think you misunderstand my comment as complaining about the situation. I really don’t care that much, I just am giving my opinion that this is a system that doesn’t seem ideal to me.
Many artists are struggling to fill seats right now. The industry can have fun trying silly schemes like this while they cancel tours in oversized venues.
No, the real solution is to make tickets strictly id-bound and non-transferable in any way.
I don’t understand this. If you can’t resell for higher than ticket price, how do they make any profit? Are you saying they’d sell the cheaper ticket for the more expensive ticket’s price? Wouldn’t price stick to the ticket, since presumably different price tiers afford different location/etc?
They ended up being acquired by a company that was much more into charging top dollar to big-spenders. The company was ultimately acquired by Live Nation and the ticket prices kept increasing until suddenly ticket sales stopped, and that whole category of festivals is now largely dead in Australia.
Taylor Swift can’t realistically play more shows than she did during the Eras Tour, and it’s unlikely that she’d have sold a million seats in London if she were charging much more than she did.
That's only if the event sells out. The ticket should have sold for a higher price such that the demand was exactly the number of seats available.
Taylor Swift can probably still sell out if she raises the price ten fold, but what kind message does this send to her average listeners? What does it mean if the most popular popular musician of our times prices the populace out? You can of course dismiss the likely negative responses as emotional and irrational, but that's the whole deal with art and culture. You can't build a fan base without catering to their emotions.
And then on the other extreme of music you have people like Fugazi, whose low ticket pricing is very obviously a part of the band's entire artistic and ideological project.
If you want to see what happens when you apply supply and demand to ticket pricing, you can just look at your nearest big league sports team. The recent trend seems to be jacking up the prices as much as they can get away with and catering more and more to VIP guests who spend a fortune in one of those "hospitality" suites. Perhaps not a coincidence that less and less people, especially younger people, around me are casually into sports these days. They got told that they are not welcome in the corporate owned sports venue and they take their attention elsewhere, and all it's left are a dwindling set of diehard fans and C-suite people who are there not for sports but for overpriced steak dinners and are too nicely dressed to cheer for their home team.
If there is room for arbitrage (which is what scalping really is) then the tickets are too cheap in the first place.
Markets are more efficient than you give them credit for. If there was no value-add it wouldn't happen. The value-add is that the scalpers take the risk and hassle off of the artist/venue. They can instantly sell out and then get back to worrying about the actual performance. Selling the tickets at their fair market value initially sounds good in theory, but then you have to spend weeks and months trying to get them sold, which is not a core competency a musical artist really wants to have. It is advantageous to underprice and know that you are sold out upfront and let someone else deal with the slog.
It's much the same as why wholesalers sell to Walmart for pennies on the dollar instead of trying to capture the retail market themselves. Selling direct to retail seems like a good idea... until you have to do it and realize you'd rather get back to what it is you're actually good at producing.
Or, when a tour is announced, start tickets at 10X the regular price and have it drop down to the regular price over the course of a couple of weeks in a simple time based mechanism. After that, if tickets are not sold out it continues to drop until sold or it hits a reserve price for Door tickets.
Good for artists, fair from a market perspective and gets rid of scalpers
And with your particular pricing scheme, there is arguably still nothing stopping scalpers from scooping up the tickets after the price drops to a level likely to be profitable for them but before fans had the time to react. In fact it would probably benefit the scalpers even more because they will have more time to track price drops than your average fan!
The average event either doesn’t sell out or takes a while to sell out.
Bad for fans,
just because you can pick a solution that can extract the most amount of money from the thing, doesn't mean you're required to do so, (nor are you required to suggest it.)
I think it's because extracting maximum value from your fans in the short term is not great if you want to have a musical career. The ones ending up with tickets will ideally, for themselves at least, be more or less indifferent to going to the concert: yes, they may get a lot out of it, but they also paid so much it was barely worth it.
Worst case, they will suffer from winner's curse, like auction winners often do: they won the auction because they were the ones who, more than everyone else, overestimated how much they'd get out of the concert.
Can you imagine the crowd mood if half the audience regrets spending so much money, and the other half is largely indifferent?
It's because artists dread this outcome that they hate scalpers, rather than becoming scalpers themselves.
A person purchasing a ticket a month or two in advance prior to the show off loads the risk from the venue. They purchase the ticket thinking they can make the show in two months because the event is a long ways away. People know what they are going to do a week advanced most of the time and therefore might just forego purchasing the ticket a that point in time, because there it has instant depreciating value at the point of sale.
Only the megastars that can command high-priced tickets would attract the old and square, which is okay because the megastars are old and square themselves by the time they've built that old and square audience. The hip and with it music fans have already moved on to seeing the next up-and-comers that play for free.
I listen to soma.fm and radioparadise.com .. I read one music magazine and listen to some of the music recommendations from there, but following any of it, over time, is a lost cause for me.
I was just remarking to someone how music apps are the least interesting, personal, and innovative of all the things I live with.
Examples: we still can’t manage playlists of albums, or down signal genres of music or even artists, or separate “calm” music for sleep from all the other generative playlist rankings they use.
Apple Music is entirely useless to me since the only “for me” stuff they’ll generate is music for sleeping. As if I don’t do other things.
Way back when, I had a very impressive iTunes catalog of actual media files that I had locally. I spent hours curating my CD rips and even the recordings from vinyl. I added id3 tags and artwork. It was glorious and was larger than my 80GB iPod could handle, so my iPod had curation as well.
Then iTunes went all streaming and wiped out my local library, not the media files, just the library. Gone. Poof. And just like that, I was done. I recently dug out the hdd with the media, and using iTunes now to find local stuff loaded onto my device is a constant fight with trying to avoid its clearly preferred Music+ nonsense.
I'm close to getting back to looking for a better music app to source my large local library. Just haven't quite gotten there yet.
Well, I am close to finally build that better music app for my large local libary of music.
(I actually do already use my own written player since 15 years, but it was always just a quick hack and never the thing)
I also do use spotify for finding artists, but have the same complaints that they are just repeating. (Also I hate the spotify app)
I recently learned that two tracks on one of my favorite recent albums are straight up missing on streaming services. This only strengthened my resolve to stay the hell away from them.
I realize that sounds like an Ad but I’ve been using it for a few months and I feel like I’ve rediscovered my joy for music again.
Netflix will never allow you to pay a one time fee for life, neither will any other streaming service on the planet.
Meanwhile, plex is a company that has employees. If I like plex, use it heavily, and want to support them I can do so with money. There are alternatives that are completely free, but I don’t like them as much and the minimal cost for plex is totally worth the value for me.
To each their own!
Plex is 16 years old and the Lindy effect applies.
Youtube music thinks "videogame music" is a genre and lumps them all together, if you make the mistake of including even one song from a game OST any recommendations go out the window.
For example, a "chill" mix with videogame music in it will happily start including Doom Eternal tracks because "they're the same thing, right?"
Whenever Spotify removed human curation from their recommendations to rely on more ML-algorithms was when it stopped being useful to me.
Went back to trackers myself, only place where musical discissions/recommendations are actually useful and wanted.
I gave up on recommendations and I just playlist my own music preferences over time. Like in the days of old.
I just want Spotify for music (playlist, recommendation, lossless audio). I don't need their podcast, audiobook, ChatGPT, concert tickets etc. This just makes their app bloated for features I will never use.
Mind you, I definitely have complaints about the app (like notifications interrupting music, their abysmal lock screen widget, and their "randomization" that always ends up playing the same few songs from a list of thousands); but I also understand why they want to expand.
I'd have fewer complaints if I could hide the sections I'm not interested in (new releases, audiobooks, podcasts, concerts, etc...).
Expand to all Google Play Music features pls Spotify (play counts & the impossible upload-your-own-music to Spotify’s cloud)
I have avoided building my own stack by uploading everything into Youtube Music (which used to be Google Music, which ... whatever.)
It gets a little worse every day, and one day it'll get bad enough where the pain of sysadmining something new will be preferable to them.
And if I want to listen to a random song I don't have while I'm outside... I just don't.
Uhh, no you don't? Nearly all of my Bandcamp purchases, except the literal one or two physical-only purchases that didn't also come with a digital copy, are all available to stream to my heart's content via the Bandcamp app and their website.
I mean, I also download it all because I DJ, but yeah... having access to it whenever I want is entirely effortless and doesn't require anything beyond Bandcamp itself.
No you do not. Just use an external drive and an MP3 player like some kind of caveman. There are plenty of high quality models out there. Additionally smart phones will let you store music on them to listen to using the player app of your choice (VLC or something).
But concert tickets, notifications, etc., seems like a no-brainer. That is firmly within the category of music.
> Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
Meh, I’m being kinda unfair b/c the experience is gonna be better. Shame Spotify forces streaming from phone (YouTube Music can run on HomePod itself like Apple Music). YouTube Music via HomePod might play the audio from a music video instead of playing the real song, so does make sense to shuttle normies to the Apple service, but guess I don’t find the situation perfect.
I have plenty of frustrations with the app, but not with the core offer as a delivery mechanism for various types of audio entertainment and information.
Rick Beato has a good video on why so many new generation superstars like Gracie Abrams are nepo babies who all the time and money in the world to chase music as a career.
._.
look at the monthly active users chart after this deal! promoted.
For concerts, I built a PWA that pulls my Navidrome artists and queries the Ticketmaster API for shows that match within a 75 mile radius once a day. It displays them in a list with their name, the venue/location and a link to buy tickets.
Or they're going to put it as a drop down from the "Repeat" button, or something stupid like that, to cause people to click it by accident.
And when you disable it in the settings they'll stop, but only for 6 months when they cram it down your throat again in a new place in the UI.
I secretly wish Spotify would fire their entire product and dev teams, allow third party clients again, and just focus their energy on increasing their catalog and paying artists more.
I don't want to see lyrics, I don't want AI shuffling, I don't want videos, I don't want concert tickets.
Artists lose, even if they get paid and all the tickets technically are sold out. Fans lose. The only people who win are scalpers who just abuse the system.
Scalpers don't buy tickets and not sell them. The most scalped concerts are obviously the most attended
> fans can’t afford the tickets
See above. I assume what you are upset about is that rich fans are the ones going.
> less connection with the artists, less interest in music overall
I think you need to explain your logic here.
I don't have the data to say whether this happens or not (edited to add: and the numbers are obviously made up), but the logic is perfectly sound; nothing would stop it from happening today.
I'm upset that artists make the tickets affordable for different groups, and their fans want to see the concert. You have 2 sides that are in agreement. Then there's a 3rd, independent side that decides to abuse the system to make profit, hurting 2 other sides.
Imagine that you pay road tax and the government builds highway. Everyone's happy. Now there's a militia that sets up checkpoints and takes a toll for driving on the highway. Unrelated 3rd party tries to benefit by abusing the system.
> Scalpers don't buy tickets and not sell them. The most scalped concerts are obviously the most attended
If you buy 100 tickets for $100 and sell them for $300 you need to sell only 34 tickets to break even. The concert hall could be sold out and half empty at the same time. Of course there are concerts where scalpers will sell 100% of what they got, but they don't need to.
Arguably if rich people are just buying the $1000 concert tickets just to flex and take pictures for IG, that's a seat that could be going to a 17-year-old who loves the band's music but can't afford more than $100. The 17-year-old meanwhile may never get to go to a show of any of their favorite bands due to this situation, meaning they miss out on this meaningful chance to connect with the music in a personal, in-person way.
Basically the case hinges on the assertion that the richest fans are not the same as the most serious fans.
