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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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’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.

Why is scalping a problem?

Competition in that space would be kinda good

i think its totally fair.

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.