Live Nation president and CEO Michael Rapino. Photo Credit: Live Nation
Spotify isn’t alone in looking to add exclusive concert-ticket access for diehard fans. Per Live Nation head Michael Rapino, his company’s discussing the possibility with Amazon Music and Apple Music as well.
The Live Nation president and CEO disclosed that interesting detail during the promoter’s latest earnings call, which followed an outwardly solid full-year report.
Closer to the week’s start, purportedly well-informed sources revealed additional information about Spotify’s upcoming Super-Premium tier.
Now confirmed by execs, the higher-priced package will reportedly feature a long-awaited audio-quality upgrade, a collection of remix tools, and exclusive access to certain acts’ concert tickets.
(Technically, said access could include pre-sales and/or better seats, per the mentioned rumblings. But Rapino focused solely on the former during the call.)
While it perhaps goes without saying, exclusive ticketing would require participation from artists and the likes of Ticketmaster/Live Nation. And in more words, Rapino, whose business currently has a variety of early access partners, emphasized the perceived value of pre-sale tickets.
“There’s a cost to that,” he summed up of adding pre-sale passes to streaming platforms, “and we would entertain and look at that option if it made sense for us in comparison to other options we have for that pre-sale, which is a very valuable asset.”
Translation: it remains to be seen whether the numbers here will work for Spotify, which is reportedly preparing to charge another $6 per month for Super-Premium. But Rapino further spelled out that his company had “talked to them all” – meaning Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music – about the subject.
Not stopping there, the 59-year-old went ahead and suggested that labels might not “have enough of their own inventory in terms of music or free songs” to render Super-Premium appealing.
“It’s always the easy go-to,” Rapino drove home, “let’s give them pre-sale access. The hard part about pre-sale is just scaling it. Everybody wants Beyoncé pre-sale, and that’s hard to scale. So we’ve been working with all three of them [Apple, Amazon, and Spotify], trying to find a model that may work for us and them, and [we] assume they’re talking to others also.”
Despite Rapino’s clear-cut interest in securing advantageous terms, Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter Tour did, in fact, have several (and probably too many) pre-sale options. A BeyHive pre-sale preceded the official artist pre-sale, with Citi and Verizon Up pre-sales in the States and a Mastercard pre-sale in the U.K. and France.
Stated differently, pre-sales are hardly rare, but from a cost-benefit perspective, pricing could prove prohibitive for streaming services seeking to get in on the action.
Bigger picture, as Spotify is already hosting performances and releasing related concert specials – see The Weeknd’s “Billions Club” show – there are seemingly better (or at least other) ways to unlock value for superfans.
Meanwhile, with the inaugural Billions Club installment and a Budweiser-sponsored “immersive experience” now in the books, Spotify isn’t shying away from organizing live events.
Earlier this week, the platform, which itself has a bit of experience selling concert tickets, moved to hire a professional tasked with “bringing Spotify to life on the live stage and/or through activations.”