Brief:
- Spotify announced a partnership with Resident Advisor, an online music magazine and community platform, to help fans find tickets to nearby events. Spotify users will see event listings for performances by their favorite musical artists and can buy tickets from Resident Advisor, per an announcement.
- Resident Advisor said it expects the collaboration to help sell more tickets for independent promoters that support and showcase new artists. The company was founded in 2001 and sells millions of tickets a year for concerts, festivals and night clubs, Variety reported.
- Spotify users can receive email notifications about events based on their individual listening history. Resident Advisor uploaded all episodes of its Exchange podcast, including its in-depth series "The Hour," to Spotify as part of the collaboration.
Insight:
Spotify's collaboration with Resident Advisor is another step in the audio streaming app's efforts to boost e-commerce, which also includes merchandise sales. While Spotify has received criticism for not paying artists enough, the company has worked to build out its platform so that independent artists can directly sell merchandise and tickets to their live events. Previously, Spotify teamed with Sony Music Entertainment to give fans of Bring Me the Horizon a chance to buy personalized T-shirts based on their favorite songs from the band's latest album.
Resident Advisor specializes in electronic dance music and has an audience of fans, DJs, producers, venue owners, promoters and record labels, Billboard reported. The partnership with Resident Advisor follows similar arrangements with ticket sellers such as Ticketmaster, Songkick, Eventbrite, AXS and Japan's Eplus, according to Variety.
Spotify this month reported that its total monthly active users (MAUs) grew 31% to 271 million in Q4 from a year earlier, while ad revenue increased 27% to 217 million. The audio streaming platform acquired The Ringer, a publisher focused on a mix of sports and pop culture content, earlier this month in its push to embrace more podcast content. Podcast consumption hours grew 200% from a year earlier on the platform, and there are now more than 700,000 podcasts available to stream on Spotify.
