Months after ending its tradition of CD sales, coffee giant Starbucks Corp on Monday confirmed the rapid growth of music streaming as it announced a partnership with Spotify Ltd.
The Swedish streaming music leader is to give accounts to its premium service to Starbuck’s 150,000 employees in the US starting this fall, allowing them to create playlists for stores.
Starbucks in turn is to promote Spotify’s premium service — which costs US$9.99 per month — in part by making the playlists accessible on the coffee chain’s own smartphone app.
The tie-up also marks the first time that Starbucks is to link its loyalty program to a third party, with Spotify users offered chances to earn “stars” that go toward free items at the coffee chain.
Through the two companies’ technological capacities, “we are reinventing the way our millions of global customers discover music,” Starbucks chairman and CEO Howard Schultz said in a statement.
“Given the evolution of the music industry and the proliferation of streaming technology, it was natural that we would partner with Spotify in offering our customers a new way to engage with their favorite music,” Starbucks president and chief operating officer Kevin Johnson added.
The partnership is to start later this year at Starbucks’ 7,000 company-owned stores in the US.
Starbucks said it would later roll out the tie-up to stores in Canada and Britain.
Starbucks was once seen by the music industry as a great hope for selling CDs, with a selection offered on racks as customers waited for their coffees.
In 2004, Starbucks also introduced in select stores a burning service, allowing customers to select tracks to make their own CDs.
However, Starbucks in March stopped selling CDs, saying at the time only that it was exploring new options.
Last year, streaming overtook CD sales in revenue generation for the first time in the US, by far the world’s largest music market.
Six Taiwanese companies, including contract chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), made the 2025 Fortune Global 500 list of the world’s largest firms by revenue. In a report published by New York-based Fortune magazine on Tuesday, Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. (better known as Foxconn) ranked highest among Taiwanese firms, placing 28th with revenue of US$213.69 billion. Up 60 spots from last year, TSMC rose 60 places to reach No. 126 with US$90.16 billion in revenue, followed by Quanta Computer Inc. at 348th, Pegatron Corp. at 461st, CPC Corp., Taiwan at 494th and Wistron Corp. at 496th. According to Fortune, the world’s
NEW PRODUCTS: MediaTek plans to roll out new products this quarter, including a flagship mobile phone chip and a GB10 chip that it is codeveloping with Nvidia Corp MediaTek Inc (聯發科) yesterday projected that revenue this quarter would dip by 7 to 13 percent to between NT$130.1 billion and NT$140 billion (US$4.38 billion and US$4.71 billion), compared with NT$150.37 billion last quarter, which it attributed to subdued front-loading demand and unfavorable foreign exchange rates. The Hsinchu-based chip designer said that the forecast factored in the negative effects of an estimated 6 percent appreciation of the New Taiwan dollar against the greenback. “As some demand has been pulled into the first half of the year and resulted in a different quarterly pattern, we expect the third quarter revenue to decline sequentially,”
WEAKER ACTIVITY: The sharpest deterioration was seen in the electronics and optical components sector, with the production index falling 13.2 points to 44.5 Taiwan’s manufacturing sector last month contracted for a second consecutive month, with the purchasing managers’ index (PMI) slipping to 48, reflecting ongoing caution over trade uncertainties, the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) said yesterday. The decline reflects growing caution among companies amid uncertainty surrounding US tariffs, semiconductor duties and automotive import levies, and it is also likely linked to fading front-loading activity, CIER president Lien Hsien-ming (連賢明) said. “Some clients have started shifting orders to Southeast Asian countries where tariff regimes are already clear,” Lien told a news conference. Firms across the supply chain are also lowering stock levels to mitigate
DIVERSIFYING: Taiwanese investors are reassessing their preference for US dollar assets and moving toward Europe amid a global shift away from the greenback Taiwanese investors are reassessing their long-held preference for US-dollar assets, shifting their bets to Europe in the latest move by global investors away from the greenback. Taiwanese funds holding European assets have seen an influx of investments recently, pushing their combined value to NT$13.7 billion (US$461 million) as of the end of last month, the highest since 2019, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Over the first half of this year, Taiwanese investors have also poured NT$14.1 billion into Europe-focused funds based overseas, bringing total assets up to NT$134.8 billion, according to data from the Securities Investment Trust and Consulting Association (SITCA),