Mickey Mouse goes to Pitchfork Music Festival. Photo by Matthew Sperzel.
Furthering its niche content offering, Spotify partners with Disney to house the studio’s musical content in one place on the app – the Disney Hub.
The dedicated hub will unite the music behind Disney movies and TV shows – think The Little Mermaid, Frozen, Star Wars instrumentals, Marvel movie soundtracks across seven different playlists, and much more.
The Disney brand is nostalgic for many. With the ability to illicit precious childhood memories and instantly recall lyrics to the sing-along songs of yesteryear, the cultural impact of Disney movies and music taps into something pure and timeless as proven by recent remakes of Aladdin, and forthcoming Lion King – complete with perfectly curated Hollywood A-list cast including Beyoncé, Donald Glover, and Seth Rogan.
Disney songs are popular on Spotify – users have streamed more than 2 billion minutes of the brand’s music this year alone with stand-out song “Let It Go” from hit movie Frozen streaming over 304 million times on its own.
While the latent nostalgia function of Disney music on Spotify is a decent hook, the likely obvious intent behind the partnership is to increase subscription revenue targeting families specifically. In the U.S., Spotify Premium accounts can be upgraded from $9.99 per month to a $14.99 Family plan, allowing for five potential users – all with separate accounts untouched by Disney classics. After all, $5.00 seems like a nominal fee to leave parents’ personalized playlists and activity history removed from their children’s musical tastes.
Competition is heating up in the streaming ecosystem and reaching new audiences, such as nostalgic adults and kids with Disney content, may prove to bring the edge needed to remain the leading music streaming company. With Spotify’s recent moves beyond music and into the podcasting space through acquisitions of key content and distribution platforms Gimlet, Parcast and Anchor, committing nearly half-a-billio into podcasting content, and a partnership with the Obama’s High Ground company, growth has always been part of the agenda.
This week it was reported Apple Inc. plans to bankroll exclusive podcast content – a truly on-brand move for the company known for employing the same strategy spending in other content verticals (specifically music) in their streaming ecosystem. Spotify shareholders are listening – the company’s stock went down as much as 2.7% in New York shortly following Apple’s news to fund original content.
As the battle for streaming dominance continues, accessibility, affordability, and content variety will collectively play major roles in consumer behavior. Spotify will share its second quarter 2019 financial results in a call with shareholders and analysts on July 31, 2019.
