Spotify‘s new ticketing feature, Reserved, launches in the US on Thursday (June 18), holding two tour tickets for an artist’s most dedicated fans to purchase ahead of the general on-sale.
Indie-pop artist Role Model – real name Tucker Pillsbury – is the first act on the program.
Eligible Premium subscribers will begin receiving notifications today that two tour tickets have been set aside for them, with a purchasing window opening on Tuesday, June 23.
Spotify announced the new feature last month and confirmed Ticketmaster parent Live Nation as the launch partner, with additional ticketing and promoter partnerships to be rolled out for the feature over time.
Bloomberg reported last month, citing people familiar with the terms, that Spotify is paying “tens of millions of dollars” for early-access ticketing rights.
The feature’s presence within the standard Premium subscription at no additional cost is itself a departure from industry expectations.
Early concert ticket access had for years been assumed to sit behind a higher-priced add-on. Bloomberg reported in early 2025 that Spotify was developing a so-called Music Pro tier – a paid add-on expected to cost up to $5.99 extra per month – with priority ticket access among its expected perks. That tier has yet to arrive in Western markets.
“This felt to us like such a core thing that all music fans would really value, that it’s something that it’s best in our premium subscription,” Charlie Hellman, Spotify‘s SVP and Global Head of Music, told MBW of the decision.
Reserved works by identifying an artist’s most engaged fans through what Hellman described as “a 360-degree view of fan activity” – including streams, saves, shares, and sustained engagement history – then holding dedicated ticket inventory for them to purchase via Ticketmaster during an approximately 24-hour window.
Spotify says the program is designed to route tickets to genuine fans rather than professional resellers. Tickets are first-sale only, eligibility is monitored against bot activity, and the company does not disclose the full methodology in an effort to prevent gaming of the system.
Unlike many existing presales, Reserved tickets come from a dedicated allocation rather than inventory carved out of another presale pool.
“This will be not a subset of a different presale system, but its own dedicated inventory that is set aside for the artist’s biggest fans on Spotify,” Hellman said.
Spotify says unclaimed tickets can be reallocated to other eligible listeners, helping keep inventory within the verified fan pool.
Reserved was unveiled at Spotify‘s 2026 Investor Day on May 21, where the company framed its push into live music as part of a shift away from music streaming toward what it described as a broader media ecosystem.
The launch comes under a multi-year partnership with Live Nation, with ticket purchases processed through Ticketmaster. Spotify has said the arrangement makes it the exclusive audio streaming service to offer this type of reserved ticket access.
Reserved builds on Spotify’s existing presence in live events.
The platform works with more than 40 ticketing partners and says its concert discovery efforts have driven more than $1.5 billion in ticket sales for artists to date.
Spotify previously tested selling concert tickets directly via a dedicated Spotify Tickets site in 2022, before scaling back those efforts in 2024 in favor of a partnership model. Reserved represents the maturation of that strategy – platform data in service of third-party infrastructure, rather than an attempt to build a competing ticketing operation.
Its Fans First presale program, launched in 2018, has given top listeners early access to ticket codes – though that program is open to all account holders, including those on the free tier.
Reserved creates dedicated inventory for Premium subscribers only, underpinned by Spotify‘s own data: the top 2% of an artist’s monthly streaming audience – what the platform calls “super listeners” – accounts for 50% of all artist ticket sales through the platform.
Spotify‘s all-time payouts to the music industry now exceed $70 billion, the company said at its Investor Day – after paying out over $11 billion in 2025 alone, which it described as the largest annual payment to music from any retailer in history.
Spotify says Reserved will initially focus on newly announced tours from select artists this summer but is set to expand across all stages of an artist’s career.Music Business Worldwide
