Uber is teaming with Spotify to give passengers a customized audio experience.
How will it work? According to the New York Times, a user simply requests a car via the wildly popular Uber app. When the car shows up, the user hops inside and will instantly be able to listen to music from their own Spotify app on the vehicle speakers.
The Times offered some context on the merger: "The project is a marriage between two companies that have eagerly worked with many other Silicon Valley companies over the years in efforts to jump-start the growth of both companies. Spotify's 2011 partnership with Facebook rewarded the music service with millions of new first-time customers. And Uber has teamed up with multiple companies — the National Football League, Morgan Stanley, Starbucks, and United Airlines, among others — to put its car-hailing service in front of as many mainstream consumers as possible."
It's a win-win, but definitely more so for Spotify, which has received positive reviews but has yet to gain a stranglehold on the mainstream.
This is good news for the company, which has had a bad couple weeks of PR after Taylor Swift pulled her entire catalogue from the app.
"If I had streamed the new album, it's impossible to try to speculate what would have happened," Swift admits, "But all I can say is that music is changing so quickly, and the landscape of the music industry itself is changing so quickly, that everything new, like Spotify, all feels to me a bit like a grand experiment. And I'm not willing to contribute my life's work to an experiment that I don't feel fairly compensates the writers, producers, artists and creators of this music. And I just don't agree with perpetuating the perception that music has no value and should be free."
Spotify co-founder Daniel Elk responded with a lengthy blog post that stated Swift would've raked in more than $6 million from the streaming service in 2014 if she left her music on the app.
But Swift's camp later refuted that statement, claiming that Swift brought in less than $500,000 via Spotify last year.
