From 8 March, all Samsung mobile devices will come with the streaming music service Spotify preinstalled. The announcement comes after Samsung and Spotify entered into a long-term partnership in 2018.
Earlier, Samsung announced that it had integrated Spotify with its artificial intelligence platform, Bixby, making it the streaming music service of choice for the South Korean mobile and tech manufacturer.
Users of specific Samsung mobile devices (including the recently launched S10) in the US could also gain access to six months of free Spotify Premium, available by redeeming it in the app.
The rise of streaming music
On-demand music streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play Music and Deezer have gained huge ground in the past few years, with statistics seeing Apple Music inch ahead of Spotify to take the top spot for the amount of users in the US in March 2018: a year ago, Apple had in the range of 49.5 million users in the US, with Spotify just trailing behind at 47.7 million users in the US.
Samsung’s move to make Spotify the default streaming music service of choice might just change those numbers, especially since there are plans to integrate it into other Samsung devices, like smart TVs and speakers.
Locally, revenue in the music streaming segment stands at US$23 million in 2019, with the industry expected to show an annual growth rate of 4.8%.
Speaking to MyBroadband in 2017, MD of Universal Music South Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, Sipho Dlamini, said, “In South Africa, although the physical market remains important, there are already over 250,000 paying subscribers on streaming services and we expect the market to grow.”