Starbucks and Spotify Announce New Partnership
Starbucks permanently removed CDs from its stores and now the coffee giant has replaced them with a new partnership with the music streaming service, Spotify.
The music streaming company will give accounts to its premium service to employees in the US later this year allowing them to create playlists.
Starbucks in turn will promote Spotify's premium service, partly by making the playlists accessible on the coffee chain's smartphone app.
"Throughout its history, Starbucks has worked closely with the music industry, offering a variety of artists a platform for their work. 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," Starbucks Chairman and CEO Howard Schultz said.
Starbucks says it's phasing in the new Spotify agreement later this fall.
"We plan on building one of the most robust digital ecosystems of any retailer in the world. Given the evolution of the music industry and the proliferation of streaming technology, it was natural that we would partner with Spotify in offering our customers a new way to engage with their favorite music," said Kevin Johnson, president and COO of Starbucks."Starbucks' ability to innovate with partners such as Spotify, creating new ways and platforms to engage with our customers, will afford us unprecedented interconnectivity across all of our capabilities, and provide new access points for Spotify as they continue to grow globally."Danielle Haynes.
