Business News Deals Digital Media

Times announces Spotify partnership, Spotify announces Bragg playlists

By | Published on Monday 10 February 2014

Spotify

Spotify and The Times last week announced a new deal that will give the newspaper’s subscribers a free premium account on the streaming service for one year. Existing subscribers who receive the newspaper seven days a week, digitally or in print, will also be extended the offer.

Chief Marketing Officer at the newspaper’s parent company News UK, Katie Vanneck-Smith, said: “Music is one of the top passions of readers of the Times and the Sunday Times and it is our aim to provide new services to our membership base to add value to their subscription. It is great to be working with a like-minded brand that also offers premium paid-for content”.

Of course the attraction for The Times is to boost its subscriber numbers by offering something worth £120 for nothing as a sweetener. For Spotify, meanwhile, this deal potentially puts it in front of a more mainstream audience who, while not huge (153,000 digital, 207,000 print), may previously not have considered signing up for a streaming music service, let alone paying for one.

It also assures Spotify the fandom of one Mr Rupert Murdoch, who tweeted last night: “Great partnership between Spotify and Times of London. Fabulous tone quality. I link Spotify to my jambox”.

Good to know. And presumably tomorrow Rupert will be logging on to the streaming platform to play some tunes lovingly selected by one Billy Bragg, who has just announced he will be compiled a ‘talking playlist’ once a month to help Spotify users navigate the service’s vast catalogues of content.

Says Bragg: “I’m looking forward to using my ‘talking playlist’ to introduce listeners to some of the amazing material in Spotify’s back pages. One of my favourite artists from the 50s is a guy named Louis Prima. Spotify have over 100 albums of his on their system and he’s just one among thousands of obscure artists who have languished in the racks in second-hand record stores for the past half century”.



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