Digital

Spotify and Ford announce app alliance

By | Published on Tuesday 26 February 2013

Spotify

A stand-out announcement from day one of the Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona yesterday was news of a partnership between Ford and Spotify which will see the popular streaming music service included on the car maker’s app platform when it launches its first ‘Sync-equipped’ vehicles in Europe later this year.

Numerous music services are already available via the Sync AppLink platform in net-connected Ford cars in the US as part of the company’s mobile-internet-powered in-car entertainment platform, including Spotify rivals like Pandora, Rhapsody and Clear Channel’s iHeartRadio.

It’s long been said that the arrival of net-connected services in the car could have a major impact on the digital music market, not least because it puts Spotify-type platforms more head-to-head in competition terms with music radio, which has long benefited from having a car-based captive audience. Ford hopes to have 3.5 million Sync-equipped cars on the road in Europe by 2015.

Although you can expect numerous content services to appear on Ford’s app platform once it goes live over here, having Spotify on board was seemingly important for the car maker.

The company’s Doug VanDagens told The Guardian: “With both Sync and AppLink coming to Europe for the first time this year, we wanted to have a great partner. We’ve been pursuing Spotify, because of their leadership position. They’re the leader for streaming music in active subscriptions, paid subscriptions and number of countries, so it’s a good deal for us”.

Services on the Sync AppLink platform are voice-controlled, and the demo of the voice-activated Spotify app has been generally well received at WMC.



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