Spotify develops Community, replaces Concert Hub with Live Events Feed

Spotify is actively developing a new feature called Community that surfaces your friends’ activity on the streamer and had relaunched its Concert Hub as Live Events Feed.

Spotify Community

Reaction to sharing your activity in real-time has been mixed at best. 7451 Spotify forum members voted against real-time sharing, but Spotify appears determined to add the feature.

While not yet generally available, users can access Community by typing in “spotify:community” in the Safari browser of any iOS device.

Live Events Feed

Spotify is replacing its Concert Hub with a Live Events Feed and adding updates to help fans find’ live events.

Fans will “see personalized recommendations for upcoming shows based upon their unique taste profile,” said René Volker, Spotify’s Senior Director of Live Events. “We’re also incorporating show discovery into the fan’s listening moment. This means that when our fans are listening to a creator they love and that creator has an upcoming tour date, we’ll be able to show that live event to them, in-app, right while they’re listening.”

“In addition, we built a new messaging tool to provide fans with personalized recommendations for upcoming live events based on their listening habits,” added Sam Sheridan, Product Manager for Live Events Discovery “And we’re putting fans in control of how they want to be communicated with by giving them tools to set their notification preferences, and offering them more information about our different ticketing partners.”

Today’s announcement emphasized Spotify’s growing list of direct relationships with primary ticketing companies including Ticketmaster, AXS, DICE, Eventbrite, and See Tickets. But it makes no mention of Songkick which is how many artists who play shows without advance tickets or at venues served by other ticketing companies post their events on Spotify.

Bruce Houghton is Founder and Editor of Hypebot and MusicThinkTank and serves as a Senior Advisor to Bandsintown which acquired both publications in 2019. He is the Founder and President of the Skyline Artists Agency and a professor for the Berklee College Of Music.