Spotify has apparently unveiled a new website to sell concert tickets to consumers. Spotify Tickets is the mysterious new feature from the streaming company that could chip away at sites like Ticketmaster and StubHub.
Ask any concertgoer about their experience buying tickets, and they’ll likely bring up a certain company’s name with a shudder: Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster is known for refusing refunds, and peddling outrageous prices and fees, all because it is the company to purchase concert tickets. While apps like Dice have entered the fold to disrupt Ticketmaster’s looming hand, it appears that music and podcast streaming service Spotify is looking to get in on the action too. Tickets.spotify.com is a new, barebones website that appears to be the company’s attempt at testing a way to provide music fans with a new way to purchase tickets. While promising, this test is almost as vague as Spotify’s comment to Gizmodo, which reads:
At Spotify, we routinely test new products and ideas to improve our user experience. Some of those end up paving the path for our broader user experience and others serve only as important learnings. Tickets.spotify.com is our latest test. We have no further news to share on future plans at this time.
Fair enough! While Spotify is tight-lipped on future plans for the rollout, a spokesperson did point me to MusicAlly’s coverage of Spotify Tickets. MusicAlly argues that Spotify Tickets is a pre-sale option for a select amount of tickets from a show’s broader pool of available tickets. Spotify has experimented with concert integration in the past — namely a list of upcoming concerts on artists’ profiles as well as a feature that sends ticket pre-sale codes out to active fans — but this would be a more direct attempt by the company to sell tickets. Artists currently listed on Spotify Tickets include Limbeck, Annie DiRusso, Dirty Honey, Crows, TOKiMONSTA, Four Year Strong, and Osees, with concerts ranging from September to December of this year.
I’m a relatively avid concertgoer and I’ll support anything that makes purchasing tickets even just a little bit less of a headache. I’m also a devoted Spotify user, and the company’s decision to target people like me is a smart move.