Spotify testing direct ticket sales to fans

The development was revealed in an exclusive interview with Music Ally this week. The service is being tested in the US with a few artists, including Annie DiRusso, TOKiMONSTA, Osees, Dirty Honey, Limbeck, Crows, and Four Years Strong.

The tickets will come from those artists’ pre-sale allocations for upcoming concerts. For now, Spotify says it is just testing the feature with its eye on pre-sales as opposed to primary ticket sales. 

“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,” a Spotify representative said. “Tickets.spotify.com is our latest test. We have no further news to share on future plans at this time.”

The music streaming platform already has several partnerships with external ticketing firms, linking upcoming concerts to its partners, which include Ticketmaster, Dice, Eventbrite, AXS and See Tickets, through its in-app Live Events feed tool. 

The concert listings feature was recently relaunched and adds to another pre-sales ticketing initiative by Spotify called Fans First, where the company partners with artists to send exclusive email offers to interested listeners on the service. However, it does not sell the actual tickets in those cases.

The new initiative could ensure tickets are sold to genuine fans while boosting artists’ earnings. 

Spotify joins a number of other major streaming services which have been testing ticketing. Earlier this week, TikTok and Ticketmaster announced a deal that will help TikTok’s users to discover events and buy tickets from within the app, as well as enable creators including musicians to promote them. Earlier this year, Snap and Ticketmaster added a ticketing feature to its Snap Map tool in Snapchat, which can be used to see upcoming events near them and buy tickets.