This is the problem with public listed companies that need to "maximize shareholder values" and look for infinite growth.
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.
I disagree; Spotify is good at serving up sound, so it makes sense for them to also serve audiobooks and podcasts; just like it makes sense for video streaming services to have both movies and tv shows. Similarly for concerts; people who listen to a lot of music are probably interested in going to see their favorite band live.
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.
Another reason to use Bandcamp and just buy music. Of course then you've gotta setup a whole stack to store it, make it available to your devices, etc etc. I dunno, Spotify certainly isn't going to get better at this point. Best we can hope is that they die and something better takes their place.
> Of course then you've gotta setup a whole stack to store it
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).
My impression from the selfhosted sub is that most people looking to replace spotify are not into albums, and want a lot of popular music not available on BC.
At least concert tickets are somewhat aligned with listening to music, unlike autoplaying video podcasts on the homepage rather than showing my playlists.
Spotify is welcome to go into all those other businesses, but why do they have to destroy their one valuable resource in an attempt to leverage it for all this other garbage? Doing one thing really good - so good that people will pay you for it - is not a "purity principle". It used to be the fundamental reason for existence for many companies.
Honestly, this could turn out to be a really great thing.
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.
This is the answer, Ive seen it in practice. You just have to show id at the door when your ticket/QR gets scanned as normal, and the names have to match. Obviously only works for over 18 events though, unless you purposely sell under and over 18 tickets seperately.
Anything requiring transferring "to friends" will be attempted to be used for scalping of course.
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.
Spotify is another entity dipping into the limited pool of available tickets and further limiting supply. I don't pay for/use Spotify and don't want to, so as far as I'm concerned this is only worsening the problem by further constraining the supply of tickets available to me.
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?
This is ultimately a supply and demand problem. If tickets sell out on the secondary market for 10 or 100x the face value, then that's the fair market price. Either artists should charge more, or perform more shows.
The last/marginal ticket in the venue sells for 10x face value. The majority of tickets don’t sell for much more than face value.
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.
I think its more complicated than that. An artist is pretty constrained by how many shows they can play in a given area which makes the total market for any given show really small and trivially manipulated for profit.
What should anything be done? If people are willing to pay five times face value for a ticket, then it signals that tickets are priced too low. Let the market price itself.
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.
so they're partnering with Live Nation, the same company that's part of the vertically integrated monopoly on ticketing, venues, and resale. Nobody is buying these tickets for cash from a scalper outside of the venue. My 2-min tought: tie use of the ticket to the payment method or id of the purchaser; allow limited transfers. If LN/TM actually cared they'd provide for risk-free transfer without charging ridiculous mark-up. Since they sell the orginial ticket 95% of the time they have almost complete control over the pricing and consumer's id.
I was a big fan of what the Cure did, they played our town and they did not allow any tickets to be resold for anything above what they originally went for.
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.
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.
So your view is “accept a monopoly and become their bitch?”
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.
Fewer people go to concerts, fans can’t afford the tickets, less connection with the artists, less interest in music overall.
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.
So scalpers will use bots to generate listens and shares, boosting listens for Spotify, in order to gain access to premium tickets. They are just adding a “barrier” that only inflates their listen counts while probably making it worse on actual valid ticket purchasers.
I don’t see how this works out as planned
Spotify is actively incentivized to mitigate that, because they're forced to pay royalties on every stream. This is, at least, a better situation than with Ticketmaster, who is actively incentivized to get scalpers as many tickets as they can.
They'd probably make this a feature for paying customers. I don't think the economics of scalping this at scale would make sense you're spending money for months and risk Spotify banning you if you get caught.
This is the problem with public listed companies that need to "maximize shareholder values" and look for infinite growth.
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.
I disagree; Spotify is good at serving up sound, so it makes sense for them to also serve audiobooks and podcasts; just like it makes sense for video streaming services to have both movies and tv shows. Similarly for concerts; people who listen to a lot of music are probably interested in going to see their favorite band live.
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 understand not wanting them to expand into playlists and audiobooks.
But concert tickets, notifications, etc., seems like a no-brainer. That is firmly within the category of music.
Another reason to use Bandcamp and just buy music. Of course then you've gotta setup a whole stack to store it, make it available to your devices, etc etc. I dunno, Spotify certainly isn't going to get better at this point. Best we can hope is that they die and something better takes their place.
> Of course then you've gotta setup a whole stack to store it, make it available to your devices, etc etc.
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.
> Of course then you've gotta setup a whole stack to store it
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).
My impression from the selfhosted sub is that most people looking to replace spotify are not into albums, and want a lot of popular music not available on BC.
At least concert tickets are somewhat aligned with listening to music, unlike autoplaying video podcasts on the homepage rather than showing my playlists.
You may need to move on to other services like Apple Music
It's the newest version of Zawinski's Law of Software Envelopment:
> Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
music listening has been falling for a while now. no company public or not will choose to commit suicide out of purity principle
Spotify is welcome to go into all those other businesses, but why do they have to destroy their one valuable resource in an attempt to leverage it for all this other garbage? Doing one thing really good - so good that people will pay you for it - is not a "purity principle". It used to be the fundamental reason for existence for many companies.
Honestly, this could turn out to be a really great thing.
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.
For those against this: I'm curious to hear your take on how you'd stop/mitigate scalping.
Named tickets, like airplane seats?
Sorry, I only thought about this for 5 seconds, but there are markets where scalping doesn't cause issues. We could look at those.
This is the answer, Ive seen it in practice. You just have to show id at the door when your ticket/QR gets scanned as normal, and the names have to match. Obviously only works for over 18 events though, unless you purposely sell under and over 18 tickets seperately.
Still have the issue of transferring tickets to friends or such if you can't make it. Axios and some providers handle this.
Anything requiring transferring "to friends" will be attempted to be used for scalping of course.
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.
Would need to provide a decent refund system alongside named tickets, offering quick and easy refunds for maybe 10% cancellation fee.
Spotify is another entity dipping into the limited pool of available tickets and further limiting supply. I don't pay for/use Spotify and don't want to, so as far as I'm concerned this is only worsening the problem by further constraining the supply of tickets available to me.
There are many solutions.
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?
I have some tickets to big gigs coming up and they cannot be resold. On Ticketmaster.
This is ultimately a supply and demand problem. If tickets sell out on the secondary market for 10 or 100x the face value, then that's the fair market price. Either artists should charge more, or perform more shows.
The last/marginal ticket in the venue sells for 10x face value. The majority of tickets don’t sell for much more than face value.
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.
I think its more complicated than that. An artist is pretty constrained by how many shows they can play in a given area which makes the total market for any given show really small and trivially manipulated for profit.
What should anything be done? If people are willing to pay five times face value for a ticket, then it signals that tickets are priced too low. Let the market price itself.
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.
so they're partnering with Live Nation, the same company that's part of the vertically integrated monopoly on ticketing, venues, and resale. Nobody is buying these tickets for cash from a scalper outside of the venue. My 2-min tought: tie use of the ticket to the payment method or id of the purchaser; allow limited transfers. If LN/TM actually cared they'd provide for risk-free transfer without charging ridiculous mark-up. Since they sell the orginial ticket 95% of the time they have almost complete control over the pricing and consumer's id.
Make it illegal to sell tickets above face value.
I was a big fan of what the Cure did, they played our town and they did not allow any tickets to be resold for anything above what they originally went for.
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.
How does this not just bias who gets ticket to those with more time preference.
willingness to stand in line for a ticket probably correlates well with fandom
I’m against it from these angles:
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.
You are just being punished for your poor judgement for not backing the winner. Not sure why you should be rewarded.
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
So your view is “accept a monopoly and become their bitch?”
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.
Why is scalping a problem?
Fewer people go to concerts, fans can’t afford the tickets, less connection with the artists, less interest in music overall.
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.
but of course! why wouldn't you encourage bot accounts listening every kind of artist to scalp tickets?
look at the monthly active users chart after this deal! promoted.
the next ticketmaster... I really loathe what spotify has become
Competition in that space would be kinda good
Streams and share won't be fair metric
i think its totally fair.
So scalpers will use bots to generate listens and shares, boosting listens for Spotify, in order to gain access to premium tickets. They are just adding a “barrier” that only inflates their listen counts while probably making it worse on actual valid ticket purchasers. I don’t see how this works out as planned
Spotify is actively incentivized to mitigate that, because they're forced to pay royalties on every stream. This is, at least, a better situation than with Ticketmaster, who is actively incentivized to get scalpers as many tickets as they can.
They'll trade off the inflated numbers for the royalties.
They'd probably make this a feature for paying customers. I don't think the economics of scalping this at scale would make sense you're spending money for months and risk Spotify banning you if you get caught.