Passengers traveling with United Airlines will have access to a whole new type of seat-back entertainment on board their next flight.
In a first-of-its-kind collaboration, United has partnered with Spotify to bring the streaming app’s popular podcasts, audiobooks, and music playlists to the carrier’s planes. The new collaboration brings more than 450 hours of new content, all available to stream on 680 United aircraft for free.
The partnership marks the first time Spotify’s audiobooks and video podcasts are available on board an airline, with popular titles such as “Good Hang with Amy Poehler,” “The Dave Chang Show,” and “The Comment Section with Drew Afualo,” all available to United fliers.
“Spotify has a huge audience and people love their content, and now our customers can enjoy it all in a simple and easy way, at 35,000 feet,” said Richard Nunn, CEO of United’s loyalty program MileagePlus. “Together, we’re giving millions of customers an entirely new way to experience and explore premium content from the world’s most popular artists, authors and podcasters–all while flying with the latest technology in the sky.”
To celebrate the new partnership, United MileagePlus members who don’t have a Spotify account can sign up for a Premium Individual subscription and receive 1,000 miles.
Starting next year, United passengers will be able to use their personal mobile devices to log into the Spotify app on the airline’s seat-back screens. With this upgrade, fliers will be able to resume playing Spotify content from where they left off last time.
On United’s aircraft that are equipped with Starlink, travelers can use the powerful in-flight Wi-Fi to stream Spotify directly from the app on their personal devices “from gate-to-gate without interruption,” the airline says. To do so, passengers can log into their MileagePlus account, accept the Starlink terms and conditions, and then open the Spotify app to begin listening the same way they do on the ground.
The airline expects to have Starlink up and running on its entire regional fleet by the end of 2025, with the first mainline plane also expected to be flying with the fast Wi-Fi service by the end of the year as well.
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