In a new collaboration with Yamaha, Philips, Bang and Olufsen, among others, Spotify has gotten the ball rolling on its newest venture, Spotify Connect. The new project will bring the music streaming service into the hardware universe by creating speakers with Spotify built directly into the WiFi chip.
This new service will allow users to access and stream their entire music collection just by using their smartphone or tablet as a remote control to play the songs.
Spotify hopes this new idea will help fix some complaints people have had with the concept of having to stream music via a movile device to speakers on a laptop or smartphone. While it's simply to connect these devices to a good speaker system, they're often subject to cutting out or buffering issues. The new system will fix that. The company claims its speakers will be able to offer more stable connections than mobile phones, according to the Telegraph.
Pascal de Mul, the company's global head of hardware partnerships, said the idea behind breaking away from simple music streaming to hardware had to do with the company's original vision of making Spotify's millions of music and comedy tracks as "ubiquitous as the CD player used to be."
The service will be available for users of the company's Premium service. This means that in order to use this service people will have to pay $9.99 per month. While putting up a paywall between users and its service may seem like a deal breaker to some, the service also entitles users to use more than radio on their smatphones and tablets. Currently Spotify's streaming on-demand service is only available on computers. To use it on mobile devices a Spotify Premium subscription is required.
Tell us what you think. Would you be excited to spend the extra $10 a month to listen to music in high quality via your home entertainment system with just a swipe on your smartphone or tablet or are you content with Spotify as it is?
