Spotify has entered into an official partnership with Sony Music according to a new report. At the moment there are no clear details as to what the partnership terms are between Spotify and Sony Music, but it’s possible that it could afford Spotify a break on the percentage of revenue that it will have to pay in royalties, similar to the deal it reached with Universal Music Group where its royalty payment percentage decreased from 55 percent to 52 percent. That being said, neither Sony Music nor Spotify have mentioned whether or not this new deal will include anything similar and since no details of the partnership were disclosed it’s not known what the deal is costing either party in the transaction.
With UMG’s music deal with Spotify having been announced back in April of this year, this new deal with Sony Music marks the second large deal for the popular streaming music service with a record label, and leads another deal that Spotify is hoping to land with Warner Music Group, though it has yet to reach an agreement with the latter.
While Spotify has been offering a paid subscription service for years and it’s the most popular streaming service of all those that are offered, having recently reached 140 million monthly active users, the company is still losing money, so new deals with record labels are imperative to Spotify’s path towards profitability. Whether or not they prove to help in this sense remains to be seen at this point. Entering partnerships isn’t Spotify’s only trick though. It’s been spending plenty of time on developing and launching new features and services for its streaming music service that will seek to engage customers and uplift its current position in the market. Features like the shared playlist creation in Facebook’s Messenger app were launched just at the end of June, and while it was possible to build playlists and share them with friends before, the new method through Messenger allows users and their friends to create a playlist together while also allowing anyone in the chat to make changes and add songs at a moment’s notice all from within the chat. It’s also recently launched offline playback for the Spotify app on Samsung’s Gear S3 smartwatch.