Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
NEW YORK (AP) — Sprint is bringing Spotify into the Framily.
The cellphone carrier said Tuesday it would offer a free six-month subscription to Spotify Premium to all new and existing customers on the Framily group discount plan. The plan costs upward of $25 a month for up to 10 friends and family members for unlimited talk, text and 1 gigabyte of cellular data.
Spotify Premium, which gives users unlimited online and mobile access to 20 million tracks, normally costs $10 a month. After the six months are up, Sprint is offering Spotify Premium for $8 a month if there are up to five people subscribing, or $5 a month if six to 10 people subscribe, for another 18 months. After that the price reverts to normal.
Non-Framily plan members will be offered Spotify Premium for free for three months as well.
The deal tying music streaming with a cellphone plan follows Beats Music's tie-up with AT&T in January.
Spotify has carrier deals in 23 markets around the world, but hadn't signed up a partnership in the U.S. until now.
Spotify CEO and founder Daniel Ek said the partnership will help the music service accelerate its growth.
"Every market where we've partnered with a great telco provider, we immediately start growing in that marketplace," Ek said in an interview. "We think this is huge."
Spotify says it has 24 million users worldwide, including more than 6 million paying subscribers. Free users can listen to Spotify with ads and certain playback restrictions.
Along with the offer, Sprint announced an exclusive phone that would improve audio quality — the HTC One (M8) Harman Kardon edition. Sprint says the lossless system delivers music that has six times the information of a compact disc and 60 times the information of an MP3.
Ek said Spotify would sound better than other streaming services on the device because it had worked with Harman on its high-quality standard, called "Clari-Fi."
Copyright © The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
