Two Months After Dropping CDs, Starbucks Forms Partnership With Spotify

The CD racks are long gone, but Starbucks wants to stay in the music game.

The coffee megalith announced yesterday (May 18) they're teaming with Spotify, promoting the music streaming service and using it to play music at their locations.

According to a statement, Starbucks will equip 150,000 employees with free Spotify subscriptions, which usually run $10 at the premium level. The employees will pick the music played in Starbucks shops from the app, at least in part from curated playlists Spotify is creating for the coffee chain.

“We’re making the barista the D.J. here,” Daniel Ek, Spotify CEO, told reporters in a conference call yesterday.

Spotify will also be incorporated into the Starbucks mobile app, which Starbucks claims is used by 16 million people in the U.S. And regular Spotify users will now be able to collect points toward Starbucks' loyalty program.

“By connecting Spotify’s world-class streaming platform into our world-class store and digital ecosystem, we are reinventing the way our millions of global customers discover music,” Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, the company’s chairman and chief executive, said in a statement.

The news comes in advance of an announced Spotify press conference tomorrow (May 20), in which the company says it will make a big announcement that some expect will involve a new streaming video push.