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Spotify tests the waters with new ticketing platform

Spotify Tickets will primarily sell presale tickets directly to users, instead of redirecting customers to third-party ticketing platforms

By IQ on 10 Aug 2022


Spotify has soft-launched a new website to sell tickets directly to its users, instead of redirecting customers to partner ticketing platforms.

The streaming provider premiered its tickets.spotify.com site today (10 August), enabling those with a Spotify account to purchase event tickets via debit or credit card.

Currently, the Spotify Tickets site lists concerts for US artists like Limbeck, Crow, Annie DiRusso, Four Years Strong, and Tokimonsta.

The tickets are taken from those artists’ pre-sale allocations – which will be Spotify Tickets’ focus, rather than general on-sale inventory.

According to the site’s terms and conditions, the company only acts as a ticketing agent and takes a booking fee. It also mentions that the platform can sell on behalf of “third parties which can include venues, event promoters, fan clubs, and artists, as their disclosed ticketing agent”.

“Some of [these tests] end up paving the path for our broader user experience and others serve only as important learnings”

Commenting on the launch of the new site, a spokesperson from Spotify told Tech Crunch: “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.”

In June, Spotify launched the Live Events Feed, an in-app destination that allows users to discover concerts in their local area via personalised listings sourced from the platform’s affiliate ticketing partners, Ticketmaster, AXS, Dice, Eventbrite and See Tickets.

Though events listed on the Spotify Tickets site are not available on the Live events page, the company’s support page says: “Some tickets listed [on the Live Events page] are available for purchase directly from Spotify.” Tickets directly sold through Spotify are also not currently listed on the artist pages.

Spotify dipped a toe into the ticketing world last year when the company experimented with selling tickets to virtual pre-recorded concerts due to the pandemic.

The launch of Spotify’s ticketing platform comes days after Ticketmaster partnered with TikTok to allow users to discover events and purchase tickets directly through the app. The ticketing giant struck a similar partnership with Snap in February.

 


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