Happy Thursday! 

A quick reminder: Yap Year is going on summer break for two weeks starting on Monday. No newsletters from May 25 through June 11! I’m going on a proper vacation and I’m trying to have as little screentime as possible. But I’ll miss ya!

That being said, I will be going to Primavera Sound again. If you missed last year’s recap, I’ll link it here. This is the third time I’ve gone to Primavera, which I’ve returned to because it just seems like the most efficient way to see my favorite artists (many of whom I can never secure tickets for, which we’ll discuss below) and take a vacation. It’s also a very well-run festival. 

But with Primavera on the horizon and some recent ticketing news—including today’s announcement that Spotify is rolling out a “Reserved” feature for artists’ biggest fans—I wanted to take stock of the current state of ticket buying. For a long time, it felt like we all had to accept that the ticketing industry was simply broken. But perhaps things could change, even if just slightly, soon.

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A few years ago, I started to cover the ticketing industry for NBC News following the massive blunder that was Ticketmaster’s handling of Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour sale. Swifties really helped spark this conversation about ticket buying, including who actually gets first access and who can afford to buy them. 

Beyond the cost (which we’ll get into further below), it seems like—despite the now-yearslong backlash toward Live Nation and Ticketmaster—it has only got harder to actually secure tickets. Anecdotally, I’ve often found myself somehow 30,000th in a presale line for a 2,700-person venue. This experience is not uncommon, as you will find numerous people complaining about the same issue on X every time there is a new ticket presale for a big artist’s tour.

One of the biggest gripes people have had with Ticketmaster for years is that their “Verified Fan” registration—which is designed to block scalpers from the platform, to dubious results—doesn’t actually measure fandom. Considering the fact that true stans of artists do a considerable amount of unpaid marketing for them, many of these diehards understandably feel like the least they are owed is the ability to access tickets. 

And now, perhaps some of these fans’ wishes have come true. Spotify has just announced its “Reserved” feature, which will reserve two tickets for an artist’s top fans whenever that musician goes on tour. The fans then have about 24 hours to purchase the tickets with no added fees from Spotify, although it’s unclear which tiers of tickets are included in this feature.

It’s also not totally clear what exactly defines a top fan, but the streaming service said that the feature will take into account streams, shares, location, and “other Spotify activity.”  

I think this is really exciting and I’m surprised something like it hasn’t come out sooner. People have been wanting this for a long time. When I interviewed fans and experts about a fandom-based ticket buying experience for NBC News in 2023, Larry Miller, the director of the music business program at New York University, had told me, “It would surprise me if those conversations were not already happening between Ticketmaster and the [streaming] services.”

Looks like he was right. Now, we finally get to see what a version of this buying experience will look like in action, and it would be interesting to see similar initiatives from other services. In practice, I’m sure there will be people that take issue with how the platform measures fandom, as everyone wants to prove they are the number one fan of an artist. Still, I think a lot of concertgoers will feel better knowing that more tickets are going to fellow fans.