Selling your hair, waiting in an endless line in the middle of the desert, summoning an internet witch or missing your own grandmother’s funeral. These are all ways fans in the new animated film try to get tickets to see their favorite artist in concert.
The situations are deliberately exaggerated, but the feeling behind them is familiar to anyone who has spent hours refreshing a ticketing page. Spotify uses precisely that anxiety as the starting point for the US campaign Great Lengths, introduced alongside the launch of the new Reserved service.
Instead of having everyone try to buy tickets at the same time when the general sale opens, Reserved identifies an artist’s most dedicated listeners. Eligible Spotify Premium users receive a dedicated window during which they can purchase up to two tickets before sales become available to the wider public.
The service was introduced in June and is currently available in the United States. Among the first artists whose tours include this model are Role Model and Rod Wave, while the list is expected to expand in the coming months. Additional markets are also planned, although they have not yet been specified.
The film does not look like a polished technology advertisement, which is where much of its character comes from. Jocelyn Charles and the Paris-based Remembers retained traces of handcraft in every frame. The backgrounds were drawn with felt-tip markers, while the characters were animated digitally, frame by frame. The result is a visual world that looks imperfect enough to feel alive, but exaggerated enough to turn the fan struggle for a ticket into complete absurdity.
The same illustrative language also moved beyond the film. Hornet adapted it for animated outdoor formats, while the original music was created by Citizen. The campaign is appearing in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago and Atlanta, particularly in places where its subject is closest to the audience, around concert venues, at stations, on trains and across other transit surfaces. The film is running in parallel across CTV, online video and paid social media.
For Spotify, the obsessive side of music fandom is not a new subject. Fan Life last year explored the details through which the audiences of different artists recognize one another, from visual codes associated with Chappell Roan and Doechii to the rituals of fans of artists such as Pitbull, Bad Bunny, Charli XCX, Lil Uzi Vert, Rezz, Sleep Token and Megan Moroney.
Spotify does not romanticize fan devotion here. Great Lengths presents it as a series of bad decisions, pointless rituals and complete panic that begins the moment the purchase button appears. Reserved enters at precisely that moment, not as a reward for fandom, but as an attempt to help the most dedicated listeners get a ticket without the entire circus that usually comes before it.
