New Spotify-Hulu Partnership Contributes to Popularity of Media Subscriptions

Kicking off the start of another school year, Spotify and Hulu recently teamed up to offer a first-of-its-kind premium entertainment streaming bundle exclusively designed for college students in the U.S. At the rate of $4.99 per month for access to both services, it’s almost too good to be true. To be able to have such a wide variety of music, television shows and movies available at one’s fingertips is a privilege that generations before us have never been able to have.

In the past, the preferred choice of viewing entertainment was to rent or own the actual content itself and be able to stream everything offline. In fact, the popular American entertainment company and media streaming website, Netflix, got on its feet as a DVD sales and rental business. With the advent of social media and increased reliance on the Internet, however, it now seems as if people just can’t seem to subscribe to entertainment fast enough. As a result, companies reassess their business models and adapt to this changing climate, starting with the earliest of adapters: college students.

Ironically, college students today generally have no time or spare money lying around, so how are these companies able to convince us to shell out the money every month for subscriptions like Amazon Prime, Netflix, Spotify, Hulu, Apple Music and more — or in some cases, all of them at once? One way they’ve been able to get around this was by creating exclusive high-quality content on their own platform, such as Netflix’s House of Cards, Orange Is the New Black and Stranger Things, Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale, or even Apple Music’s album exclusives like Drake’s Views. Having won multiple awards, these entertainment exclusives alone were able to convince people to choose entertainment subscriptions over other options.

Beyond exclusive content, these streaming sites also offer a key thing: variety on-demand. To offset shorter attention spans and the rapid pace at which college students consume information, these entertainment companies provide seemingly endless choices for their users. Music subscriptions in particular are convenient and practical in that there is always something new to listen to once a playlist gets old. For example, Spotify alone has over 30 million tracks available, making it easy for users to quickly discover new music at their fingertips.

At the status quo, college students are still one of the largest customer bases for media streaming businesses. For now, it seems as if we are still willing to dish out the dollars every month for unlimited streaming of some of our favorite television shows, movies and music.