Written by Music Business Worldwide — Spotify is in with a fighting chance of topping 50m subscribers in the first quarter of this year. And it’s just struck a deal which it clearly hopes will give it a shove in the right direction.
The New York Times today announced that new digital subscribers to its publication – who sign up for a one-year commitment – will ‘receive free, unlimited access to Spotify Premium’.
The special offer is available for a limited time to US residents who are not current subscribers to The New York Times or Spotify Premium.
The deal mirrors a similar bundle promotion which Spotify ran with The Times and The Sunday Times in the UK in 2014.
That offer, whose website remains live, enabled users to purchase a ‘Digital Pack’ 12-month subscription to the newspaper for £6 a week, including free unlimited Spotify Premium.
For $5 a week, subscribers to the new NYT promotion will receive unlimited access to NYTimes.com and its mobile apps, plus unlimited access to Spotify’s catalogue of more than 30 million songs and two billion playlists.
“At The Times we are not only dedicated to helping our readers understand the rapidly changing world around them, but also to helping them live better lives,” said Meredith Kopit Levien, executive vice president and chief revenue officer, The New York Times Company.
“News and music have gone hand-in-hand since the early days of radio, and because personalization and curation are central to what both The Times and Spotify do so well, we created an experience for Times readers that gives them access to all the news and all the music that they want in one premier subscription.”
As covered in the NYT’s press release: ‘With an annual retail value of $120, a Spotify Premium subscription offers instant, on-demand access to more than 30 million songs at the highest audio quality – with zero ads.’
According to MiDIA Research, Spotify finished 2016 with 43m subscribers.
That means the company grew its paying customer base by three million subs in the last quarter of the year (Oct-Dec), having confirmed 40m subscribers in September.
In the previous six months, Spotify’s subscriber officially figure jumped by 10m (after Daniel Ek confirmed 30m subs in March 2016) – an average of 5m net adds in each of the period’s two quarters.
In other words, according to MiDIAs stats, Spotify’s subscriber growth slowed slightly in the final three months of 2016, despite an aggressive $0.99-for-three months promotion offered to new customers in multiple territories.
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