Sony Partners With Spotify to Launch Playstation Music

For Sony, it’s out with the old, and in with the new.

Today, the tech conglomerate announced that it’s ditching its existing streaming music service, Sony Music Unlimited, and replacing it with a new service called Playstation Music, which will give users access to 30 million songs and 1.5 billion playlists, all powered by Spotify. The new service is set to launch some time this spring on the PS4 and PS3 game consoles, as well as on Xperia smartphones and tablets.

For Sony, this partnership is a bold admission that when it comes to infiltrating the increasingly competitive streaming music industry, even a company like Sony needs some help. It faces existing rivals like Pandora, and until now, Spotify, as well as newer ones, like Apple, which acquired Beats Electronics for $3 billion last year and is now working to make Beats’ music streaming service an integral part of the iPhone experience. Even Google recently got into the streaming space, acquiring the playlist company, Songza, last summer.

With the Spotify partnership, Sony acquires not only industry expertise and an immense library of music, but also a wider international footprint. To date, Music Unlimited has been operating in 19 countries, but Spotify will more than double that number, bringing PlayStation Music to 41 markets at launch.

“Music is a core component of the entertainment offering that consumers expect from Sony, and our goal with PlayStation Music is to provide the most compelling music experiences to the millions of PlayStation Network users around the world,” Andrew House, President and Group CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment, said in a statement. “This partnership represents the best in music and the best in gaming coming together, which will benefit the vibrant and passionate communities of both Spotify and PlayStation Network.”

For Spotify, this partnership is another way of inserting itself into users’ lives. If Spotify is already pre-loaded on devices and in apps, users have less motivation to seek out other services. Spotify took a similar approach when it partnered with Uber last year, enabling Uber riders to play music from their Spotify accounts during Uber rides.

And yet, despite the obvious business advantages to partnering with a major device manufacturer like Sony, Spotify CEO and founder Daniel Ek cited much more mundane motivations for the partnership. “As a gamer and PlayStation 4 user myself,” reads a statement from Ek, “I’m super excited to be able to soundtrack my FIFA 15 Arsenal matches later this spring.”