And the Spotify announcements just keep coming. The folks behind the popular streaming music service called attention to a new deal with Deutsche Telekom earlier this morning, and now the company has revealed that it’s bringing physical gift cards to the United States.
The cards come in $10, $30, and $60 denominations, which translates to one, three, and six months of premium streaming music access, respectively. They’re a Target-exclusive (for the time being, anyway) and the move comes just ahead of the holiday buying rush — music-lovers shouldn’t be surprised to find one of these nestled in their stockings.
Yeah, this may not seem like earth-shattering news, but it’s a big deal for domestic Spotify customers who would rather purchase their access in chunks ahead of time.
You see, U.S. users have tended to get the short end of the stick when it came to purchasing prepaid subscriptions to Spotify’s premium service. There was a time (last year, mostly) when U.S. customers were able to purchase 1, 3, 6, and 12 month chunks of music streaming goodness in the form of virtual gift cards, but Spotify quietly killed that functionality towards the end of 2011. As far I can tell, Spotify never offered an official reason for the move, though the members of the Spotify community were quick to offer up their own theories.
The prevailing notion? It was thought that European customers wanted to take advantage of favorable exchange rates by having friends in the U.S. buy those e-cards for them. It was only last month that Spotify brought that feature back to the States, though only time will tell if it sticks around for good.