Music-Streaming Service Spotify Signs Major Partnership Deal With Samsung

The biggest music-streaming service in the world, Spotify, has signed a new major partnership with Samsung, the biggest smartphone producer in the world. Spotify will now be the official music service provider for all of Samsung’s products, including smartphones, televisions, tablets, watches, and speakers. In the future, when you purchase a Samsung product, Spotify will be integrated into the set-up process on new devices, as well as merged into Samsung’s voice assistant program and Samsung’s smart-home apps.Although never directly addressed by Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, there is now a clear competition between Spotify and Apple‘s Apple Music, as the latter app comes readily installed on all of Apple’s iPhones and also just landed a deal to give Verizon smartphone customers six months of free service. With Samsung being the biggest smartphone producer in the world, Spotify should have a less strenuous battle reaching smart-phone users around the world. Plus, unlike Apple Music’s subscription-only service, Spotify offers an ad-supported listening tier that costs nothing for the consumer, allowing a more pleasant experience for first-time Spotify users unfamiliar with the app’s interface.In a recent Q&A with his own company, CEO Daniel Ek explained that the partnership,Reduces the friction for users to get Spotify up and running on multiple Samsung devices once the accounts have been linked” and “allows us to create a seamless music listening experience together for the user that would be hard for either of us to build alone.” He added, “We believe that this significant long-term partnership will provide Samsung users across millions of devices with the best possible music streaming experience, and make discovering new music easier than ever — with even more opportunities to come.So what does this mean for Spotify? It’s likely we will see a rise in overall Spotify users and artists joining the platform. It also could mark the transition out of a completely Apple-product dominated world, but we’ll just have to wait and see. [H/T Rolling Stone]