Spotify and Headspace team up for combined subscriptions
Spotify are joining Headspace for their first ever joint subscription, allowing you to subscribe to both services for an overall discount.
Spotify’s new partnership with meditative service Headspace offers a subscription to both services for $14.99 a month. The partnership is unique in that both services will remain entirely independent, just allowing you to subscribe to both at the same time for a price drop.
Spotify’s vice president of distribution, Marc Hazan said to Music Ally: “It’s the first partnership of this nature where we’ve partnered with another subscription service to enrich a key use case in our service.” Despite the combined subscription neither Headspace or Spotify will feature any extended integration of either service though Hazan said: “Further crossover is something we’ll continue to monitor and explore to see if it makes sense.”
Although for anyone who only wants one of these services this partnership is pointless it sets a new bar for potential partnerships in the future. As subscription services are quickly becoming ubiquitous bundle offers like this could create unique new partnerships and offer discounts on subscriptions when you’re subscribed to a number of select services. If Netflix want to offer me a package with my music streaming service combined for cheaper overall I definitely wouldn’t say no.
When a Netflix-type partnership was suggested to Hazan he responded: “We will continue to monitor the demands and desires of our users. Right now, we’ve been focused on this partnership, based on the observation that there was a real consumer need to fulfil.”
Headspace are the clear winners in this case with Spotify’s giant userbase and reach being opened up to Headspace. The meditation and relaxation service has seen success with over 10 million people having used their service so far but this partnership should give them a much bigger push.
Headspace CEO Sean Brecker told Music Ally: “One of the first reasons the partnership is really attractive to us is that Spotify obviously offers us massive scale, and it is also global. It allows us to deliver Headspace in markets where we do not have a significant presence yet.
“We’re also big Spotify fans: it’s the best [music] product out there, the best user experience, and that’s important to us too. If we’re going to partner with someone, it’s critical that it’s a world-class user experience. If there was a partner out there that had scale but was not a great product, I would not see us doing that kind of partnership.”