Sabrina Carpenter will give her top Spotify listeners early access to her 'Short n' Sweet' tour

In an increasingly competitive and inaccessible ticketing market, fans have long demanded artists do something to protect them against bots and exorbitant pricing. Rising pop star Sabrina Carpenter is offering a solution ahead of her Short n' Sweet Tour.

The "Espresso" singer is partnering with Spotify and AEG to create a Spotify Top Listener Pit at concert venues across North America. Top listeners of Carpenters' music on Spotify will receive an exclusive presale code through the newly launched Fans First Front Row. In addition, the music giant will continue to do the Spotify Fans First presale, which launched in 2018, giving early access to a broader group of top listeners.

Ticketing practices came under fire when tickets for Taylor Swift's The Eras Tour — Carpenter opened for Swift during the Latin American leg — went on sale in 2022. Ticketmaster crashed ahead of the Verified Fan Presale, and tickets sold out before the general scale, resulting in many fans failing to get tickets. The uproar led to a Senate hearing investigating Ticketmaster's parent company, Live Nation, and the lack of competition in the music industry. Ultimately, the U.S. Justice Department moved to break up Ticketmaster and Live Nation over antitrust violations.

Swifties complained about the unfair ticketing process at the time, suggesting a remedy similar to what Carpenter is piloting. One fan posted a popular meme format of a utopia with the caption, "Society if eras tour tickets were offered to top Spotify listeners instead of already rich influencers" on X / Twitter. The post garnered 11,000 likes.

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Spotify has previously experimented with rewarding top listeners. For example, last summer, it partnered with The 1975, offering tickets to the band's top North American listeners.

These sorts of partnerships incentivize more time spent on the app and further encourage Spotify statistics as a fandom status symbol. But is Spotify moving more into the ticketing space the solution to a problem many — including the U.S. Justice Department — attribute to monopolies in the music industry? The results of Carpenter's experiment will be our first answer.