Spotify rolls out Concerts Near You playlist

Spotify is rolling out personalised playlist Concerts Near You to help listeners discover upcoming concerts in their area.

The list is updated each Wednesday with 30 songs from artists performing nearby, inspired by users’ listening habits.

The function also includes full event details and ticket links directly from expandable track rows in the playlist, with both the playlist and the event info designed to be easily sharable, so friends can plan to attend a concert together.

“There’s nothing worse than realising that your favourite artist played your town last week,” says Charlie Hellman, VP, global head of music product at Spotify. “Concerts Near You solves for that. This new playlist not only makes it easier for fans to find shows nearby, but it also gives artists a powerful new way of selling more tickets and filling venues with the audiences who love their music most.”

To find their playlist on their own personalised Live Events feed, fans just need to search for “concerts” on the Spotify app.

The streaming platform recently declared that it had paid the music industry US$10 billion in 2024

The streaming platform recently declared that it had paid the music industry US$10 billion (€9.2bn) in 2024, amid the ongoing row over royalty rates.

Live Nation boss Michael Rapino confirmed during the company’s earnings call last month that the promoter had held talks with Spotify, as well as streaming rivals Apple and Amazon, over potential ticket presale deals.

“They’ve approached us all,” he said. “We’ve talked to them all about ideas if they wanted inventory. There’s a cost to that and we would entertain and look at that option if it made sense for us in comparison to other options we have for that presale, which is a very valuable asset.

“We do deals for the artists, but ultimately the artist has control of it and that artist’s job is to maximise the revenue from it. They’re not giving that away to anyone for free. So whether we partnered with them and found sponsors, or we paid for it, it’s valuable.

“It’s always the easy go-to, ‘Let’s give them presale access.’ The hard part about presale is just scaling it. Everybody wants Beyoncé presale and that’s hard to scale. So we’ve been working with all three of them, trying to find a model that may work for us and them and I assume that they’re talking to others also.”

Last December, The Weeknd starred in Spotify’s first-ever Billions Club Live concert in Los Angeles, held exclusively for his top fans on the service, to celebrate having the most songs with more than one billion streams on the platform.

The company also expanded its its Mi Primer Escenario (My First Stage) scheme, which launched in Mexico last year, to Argentina, offering up-and-coming artists a slot at one of the country’s top rock festivals.

The streaming giant previously courted controversy in December 2023 when it announced it was withdrawing its financial support from two French festivals – the Francofolies de La Rochelle and the Printemps de Bourges festivals – in response to a new tax imposed on streaming services in the country. It went on to increase its subscription prices in France last year due to the “additional costs” of the tax.

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