Spotify and Hulu have confirmed that they are expanding their existing partnership to offer American consumers streaming tunes and some telly-on-demand for a mere $12.99 a month. The new package, which comes with some ads to watch on the Hulu side, saves the consumer $5 overall.
The two streaming firms launched a combined music and telly streaming package for American students last year. At the time the two companies promised that that tie-up was “the first step” in a series of bundles “with offerings targeted at the broader market to follow”. And look, an offering targeted at the broader market has just followed.
Some reckon that a way to extend paid-for music streaming to a more mainstream audience is to bundle music services with TV and film offerings. The logic is that while the majority of consumers are probably unlikely to ever pay for a standalone music service, they may pay extra to add music to a video service. In this case, a Hulu customer would be paying an additional $5 a month to get on-demand ad-free access to Spotify’s vast music library.
For now the bundle is only available to existing Spotify premium users – so the upsell is added telly shows. However, it should become available to everyone in the US later this year, so that getting access to both Spotify and Hulu through one subscription won’t require committing to the former first.
Elsewhere, Bloomberg reports gossipers gossiping that Spotify is planning an overhaul of its freemium level, providing more functionality to free users on mobile devices. Limited functionality on mobile – along with the occasional ads – are key differentiators between freemium Spotify and premium Spotify.
With the former designed to promote the latter, free streaming needs to be inferior in some ways so to encourage free users to start paying. Some in the music industry feel that free streaming should more inferior than it currently is. Though Spotify has generally pushed back on suggestions it should put additional limitations onto free streamers.
More details about the extra functionality on Spotify free are expected soon. As well as some sort of announcement about the much touted Spotify smart speaker product that nobody wants but we’re going to get anyway whether you like it or not. No one cares what you like.
[from https://ift.tt/2lvivLP]
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