Buy a Spotify subscription, get a Hulu subscription for free.
U.S. college students can now buy a Spotify/Hulu bundle for $5 a month
That would normally cost at least $13 a month. It may also be a new business model for Spotify.
Peter Kafka covered media and technology, and their intersection, at Vox. Many of his stories can be found in his Kafka on Media newsletter, and he also hosts the Recode Media podcast.
That’s the offer from Hulu and Spotify, who are teaming up on a promotion where some U.S. college students can now get monthly subscriptions to both services for a total of $5 a month.
That’s a significant discount, as Spotify’s “Premium for Students” service normally costs $5, and Hulu’s basic ad-supported service costs $8 a month.
Both services have worked with other companies to bundle their offerings before: Hulu, for instance, will sell you a subscription to Showtime, and the New York Times will give new digital subscribers a year of Spotify for free.
Subscription video giveaways aren’t new, either: Yesterday, T-Mobile said it would give away Netflix subscriptions to wireless customers who paid it at least $80 a month.
What’s interesting about this one is that it’s the first time Spotify has bundled a video subscription with its own service, because it points to a possible template: While Spotify has tried, without success, to launch its own video offering, there are plenty of people who think it could do a good job marketing other people’s video services to the 60 million people who are already paying for Spotify subscriptions.
And that model — high-margin, very scalable, doesn’t involve haggling with content owners for rights — could be very useful to have up and running when Spotify goes public, which could happen by the end of the year.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
