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MUSIC

Swedish Spotify teams up with US cafe chain

Starbucks customers could soon be listening to Spotify lists as they sip their lattes, after the coffee giant announced a new partnership with the Swedish streaming leader.

Published: 19 May 2015 08:27 CEST
Swedish Spotify teams up with US cafe chain
Spotify will allow Starbucks to create playlists for its stores. Photo: AP Photo/Ted S. Warren

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The move is being rolled out in the United States and will eventually make its way across the Atlantic, the company said on Monday.

Spotify will give accounts to its premium service to Starbucks' 150,000 US employees in autumn, allowing them to create playlists for stores.

Starbucks in turn will promote Spotify's premium service – which costs $9.99 a month – in part by making the playlists accessible on the coffee chain's own smartphone app.

Despite facing some competition from new streaming services such as rap mogul Jay Z's Tidal, Spotify remains the market leader in music streaming, with 60 million users in 2014, compared to 36 million at the end of 2013.

However, earlier this month Spotify announced that it had tripled its net losses in 2014 – up to 1.5 billion kronor ($182 million) from 46.1 million in 2013 – although the company put the losses down to heavy investments.

VIDEO: The top Swedish songs of the month

The new tie-up makes the first time that Starbucks will link its loyalty programme to a third party, with Spotify users offered chances to earn “stars” that go toward free items at the coffee chain.

“We are reinventing the way our millions of global customers discover music,” Howard Schultz, the chairman and chief executive officer of Starbucks, said in a statement.

“Given the evolution of the music industry and the proliferation of streaming technology, it was natural that we would partner with Spotify in offering our customers a new way to engage with their favourite music,” added Kevin Johnson, president and chief operating officer of Starbucks.

The partnership will start later this year at Starbucks' 7,000 company-owned shops in the US. It will later roll out the tie-up to cafes in Canada and Britain.

Starbucks, which owns 10 stores in Sweden, was once seen by the music industry as a great hope for selling CDs, with a selection offered on racks as customers waited for their coffees. But in March the company stopped the venture, saying that it was exploring new options.

Streaming has caught on at different paces around the world, with the tech-savvy Nordic countries rapidly embracing it. In the US, by far the world's largest music market, streaming overtook CD sales in revenue generation for the first time. However, CDs remain the preferred format in countries such as Germany and Japan.

CULTURE

New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday’s death

Fans of the late Johnny Hallyday, "the French Elvis Presley", will be able to commemorate the sixth anniversary of his death with two songs never released before.

Published: 17 November 2023 09:05 CET
New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday's death

Hallyday, blessed with a powerful husky voice and seemingly boundless energy, died in December 2017, aged 74, of lung cancer after a long music and acting career.

After an estimated 110 million records sold during his lifetime – making him one of the world’s best-selling singers -Hallyday’s success has continued unabated beyond his death.

Almost half of his current listeners on Spotify are under the age of 35, according to the streaming service, and a posthumous greatest hits collection of “France’s favourite rock’n’roller”, whose real name was Jean-Philippe Leo
Smet, sold more than half a million copies.

The two new songs, Un cri (A cry) and Grave-moi le coeur (Engrave my heart), are featured on two albums published by different labels which also contain already-known hits in remastered or symphonic versions.

Un cri was written in 2017 by guitarist and producer Maxim Nucci – better known as Yodelice – who worked with Hallyday during the singer’s final years.

At the time Hallyday had just learned that his cancer had returned, and he “felt the need to make music outside the framework of an album,” Yodelice told reporters this week.

Hallyday recorded a demo version of the song, accompanied only by an acoustic blues guitar, but never brought it to full production.

Sensing the fans’ unbroken love for Hallyday, Yodelice decided to finish the job.

He separated the voice track from the guitar which he felt was too tame, and arranged a rockier, full-band accompaniment.

“It felt like I was playing with my buddy,” he said.

The second song, Grave-moi le coeur, is to be published in December under the artistic responsibility of another of the singer’s close collaborators, the arranger Yvan Cassar.

Hallyday recorded the song – a French version of Elvis’s Love Me Tender – with a view to performing it at a 1996 show in Las Vegas.

But in the end he did not play it live, opting instead for the original English-language version, and did not include it in any album.

“This may sound crazy, but the song was on a rehearsal tape that had never been digitalised,” Cassar told AFP.

The new songs are unlikely to be the last of new Hallyday tunes to delight fans, a source with knowledge of his work said. “There’s still a huge mass of recordings out there spanning his whole career,” the source said.

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