Will Spotify start giving away concert tickets? “Reserved” is the new service designed for Premium super-subscribers

If you thought it was already difficult to get tickets for your favorite artist’s concert - between bots, endless digital queues and increasingly unaffordable prices - today, Spotify has officially entered this fragile ecosystem as well. During the platform’s Investor Day, Global Head of Music Charlie Hellman announced the launch of Reserved, a new ticketing initiative designed to identify an artist’s most loyal fans and reserve two tour tickets for them. For now, the service will be tested in the United States starting this summer, involving a selection of particularly active Premium users on the platform.

How does Reserved work?

Reserved was created as a service aimed at rewarding the most loyal Premium subscribers to their favorite artists while also addressing the increasingly widespread issues surrounding ticket purchases: digital scalpers, automated bots and endless online queues. Spotify has not yet clarified in detail the formula used to identify these “superfans”, but explained that the system will take into account parameters such as streams, shares, saves and repeated activity on the platform. The goal is to verify that real people are behind these accounts, rather than bots created to bypass ticketing systems.

Not all Premium users will have access to the initiative, however, especially because the number of fans considered “eligible” will inevitably exceed the available seats for tours. The real difference compared to traditional presales is that, instead of simply receiving a code to enter a virtual queue, selected users will have the concrete guarantee of finding tickets available within a specific time window. Spotify, together with promoters, will in fact reserve a specific allocation of tickets exclusively for these users, transforming the purchasing process into a less stressful and theoretically safer experience. The initiative will initially launch in collaboration with Live Nation, before gradually expanding to other promoters and ticketing partners already integrated into the platform.

The exclusivity of music

Reserved, however, inevitably brings to light some deeper issues tied to the very nature of the project. The first concerns the concept of the “superfan”, which continues to be the foundation of this new narrative. But one question naturally arises: is a Premium subscription really necessary to certify the authenticity of devotion to an artist? Probably not. And this is where the initiative’s main paradox emerges: while strategies like Reserved attempt to solve a real problem within the concert industry, they also risk transforming music, historically democratic, accessible and collective, into an experience increasingly filtered through algorithmic logic.

Both Reserved and, more broadly, Spotify Premium seem in fact to exclude a portion of users who simply cannot afford that kind of privileged access. More importantly, they reduce some of the most meaningful aspects of the musical experience, such as listening and attending concerts, to a series of metrics, tasks and behaviors monitored by the platform, as though passion itself could be quantified by an algorithm.

And yet, the concert experience is built on something entirely different: it lives through anticipation, through waiting in line, through the anxiety of the countdown before sales open, even through confronting a ticket price that may feel too high. It lives in the journey to the venue, in the hours spent outside the gates, in the shared tension among fans. All of this, although now intensified by AI, bots and aggressive resellers, still represents the very core of the live music experience.

Music, after all, belongs to everyone. It is democratic, instinctive and, in some cases, even anarchic. Concerts become alternative spaces: suspended places where, for a few hours, everything happening outside ceases to matter. Music changes form, takes on another sound, arrangements are reworked, stage designs are built and immersive experiences are created to amplify the imagery evoked by an album. The authenticity of music, then, lies not only in the work itself, but above all in the experiential universe it is capable of generating, one that finds its most intense expression in the live performance.

The future of ticketing

Within this context, shaped by anticipation, desire and a growing collective inability to wait the necessary amount of time for what we truly want, Reserved presents itself as a convenient solution. But speaking about hierarchies among fans, authenticity and certified devotion, as though broader economic and social implications did not exist, is pure fantasy. Still, the potential hidden behind the service’s concept should not be underestimated: that of honesty. An honesty that, in this specific case, still seems difficult to find within the platform’s algorithms, yet continues to exist in the people who genuinely attend concerts.

Perhaps this is exactly where the future of ticketing should begin: from the creation of more transparent and authentic platforms, capable of guaranteeing real access to live events without turning them into rewards for good digital behavior. And it is precisely within this need that new startups and alternative models could emerge, built not so much on exclusivity, but on the idea of the concert as an immersive, collective and deeply human experience. For now, all that remains is to wait for the service to launch this summer and see how audiences will react. In the meantime, we will continue staring at digital queues that never seem to truly move forward. But then again, perhaps even that has become part of the experience.