The owner of the MTV cable channel, Viacom, recently struck a partnership with Spotify in hopes of making MTV musical again. No, MTV isn’t planning on showing more music videos and behind the scenes artist footage like they used to. Instead, they are enriching their musical output through the internet. Their new partnership with Spotify allows MTV viewers to stream free music from MTV’s featured artists through Spotify, as well as gain access to playlists that coincide with some of MTV’s original series, such as ‘Teen Wolf’.
Spotify’s 40 million subscribers will now be able to gain access to at least 150 MTV playlists, bringing a lot of attention back to MTV’s musical side (the side that most of us really cares about). According to Spotify founder and chief executive, Daniel Ek, “the younger audience has a very different relationship to (Viacom’s) properties, which have become more about reality shows.” His hope regarding this new partnership is to “bring back the music in MTV and bring its programming to a wider audience.” This partnership seems to not only offer more music from the cable giant, but to integrate the newer reality and scripted TV shows into the musical arena, pairing the older persona of MTV with their current one.
