Starbucks agrees With Spotify to stream music

In the heyday of the CD, Starbucks was a leading outlet for the music industry to sell its new releases. Now, in the age of streaming, the chain of coffee shops has a new partner: Spotify. On Monday, Starbucks, which operates more than 7,000 coffee shops in the United States, announced a multiyear deal to work with Spotify, the subscription streaming service, to produce playlists for its stores and promote Spotify at its locations.
The move comes two months after Starbucks stopped selling CDs in its stores.

“By connecting Spotify’s world-class streaming platform into our world-class store and digital ecosystem, we are reinventing the way our millions of global customers discover music,” Howard Schultz, the company’s chairman and chief executive, said in a statement.

The partnership, which the two companies said would begin at Starbucks stores in the fall, will let Starbucks employees and customers pick the songs played at the shops, and incorporate Spotify into Starbucks’s mobile app, which Starbucks said was used by 16 million people in the United States.

“We’re really making the barista the D.J. here,” Daniel Ek, chief executive of Spotify, said in a conference call.

As part of the program, about 150,000 Starbucks employees will get complimentary subscriptions to Spotify’s premium service, which normally cost $10 a month, beginning this summer.

In addition, Spotify customers will be able to collect points in Starbucks’s customer loyalty program, My Starbucks Rewards.

For Spotify, the deal also brings valuable in-store promotion just as it prepares to face a major new competitor in Apple, which is expected to introduce its own streaming music service as early as next month.

Spotify, which is available in 58 countries, said in January that it had 15 million paying subscribers and another 45 million who listen free with advertising.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Source: NY Times