Vodafone in Ireland has joined forces with music-streaming service Spotify to allow mobile users to enjoy access to the 20m-song catalogue at an affordable price on its billpay or Pay as You Go plans.
The new Spotify service kicks off on Friday and will be supported by a €1.5m marketing campaign.
“For Vodafone it is an opportunity to give a premium service to customers,” Vodafone consumer director Marcel de Groot told Siliconrepublic.com.
Spotify is the largest music-delivery service in the world and we aim to make it available to customers on tariffs they can afford. Our decision is based on consumer insights – consumers want this and this will be a huge differentiator for our network.”
For billpay customers of Vodafone, users of the Red Essentials package (free Vodafone to Vodafone calls, 100 any network calls, unlimited texts, 1GB of data) Spotify will come bundled for €40 a month, Red with Spotify (the same with 3GB of data) will cost €60 a month, while Red Super with Spotify (the same but with 500 international calls and texts and 7GB of data) will cost €80 a month.
Pay As You Go customers will get Spotify as an add-on at €9.99 a month with 250MB of data.
Spotify’s director of Global Strategic Partnerships Chris Bevington told Siliconrepublic.com: “We find that our user base is increasingly mobile-first. We are addressing the vast majority of their needs via our mobile offering. Partnering with a leading telecoms operator like Vodafone is an obvious choice for Spotify.”
Caching in
Bevington explained that the way the Spotify app is constructed, every time a user plays a track on Spotify it gets saved into their cache, so the next time the user plays the song it is played via their cache rather than streaming – cutting down on feared mobile costs.
“We’re actually seeing that in terms of the average monthly user – only 15pc of their use goes over the network, some 45pc goes across the phone’s cache in offline mode and 40pc on Wi-Fi so that keeps cellular usage quite low.”
De Groot chimed in: “We’ve constructed our allowances on tariffs to give users an experience that is worry-free. It’s fair to say that the data allowance is more than enough to accommodate that – even the pre-pay bundle which will cater for 96pc of the population is well constructed.”
Music fan image via Shutterstock
