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Spotify Takes Flight on United Airlines: Here's What You Get
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has taken flight on United Airlines–but its 1.0 appearance on the seatback screens of United's planes is more like a Little Free Library with wings than a jukebox in the sky.
The Chicago-based carrier that it's bringing the to the on-demand entertainment displays aboard 680-plus aircraft. On Friday, I gave it some extended listening and viewing on a United flight from San Jose to Houston.
On the seatback screen of that Boeing 737 Max 9, a 'Spotify' category replaced the 'Audio' option on the home-screen menu. That offered selections of podcasts, what United's press release calls 'specially curated versions of Spotify's most popular playlists,' and audiobooks–all, United explained, cached locally for now instead of relying on .
The selection was deepest in podcasts, with 31 available for a listen. Somebody at Spotify or United must be a fan of , because the studio had 18 of those slots. Instead of that, I listened to a Wall Street Journal recap of .
I counted 15 playlists, and they proved to be more of a throwback listening experience than the for each suggested. The tunes in such playlists as 'Good Vibes,' 'Jazz Classics,' 'Sunny Day,' and decade-specific mixtapes from the 1960s to the 2010s played on a loop, with no option to jump to a particular song or see which one was playing–an experience not that different from the inflight soundtrack options of two decades ago.
The audiobooks category had 13 titles, many of which would require more than one flight to listen to. , the 2023 deep dive into by Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman, would have run 633 minutes, so I had to content myself with hearing one chapter.
That part will become more useful next year, when United plans to add a feature that will allow passengers with Spotify's app on their devices to log into their accounts within the seatback screen. That should make it easier to resume and pause listening to Spotify's longer-form content.
The video podcasts that , however, lurked under the home-screen menu's 'TV' heading. The 13 video podcasts available included a handful of Joe Rogan's episodes, but not any of the more notorious or guests of Spotify's ; other video hosts include Amy Poehler and Trevor Noah.
The United aircraft with Spotify onboard include international-service planes with Polaris business-class cabins (which also feature screens throughout economy) as well as an increasing number of narrowbody planes that have received that include screens at every seat for .
A database maintained by aviation enthusiasts shows that the airline has brought those 'United Next' interiors to .
United's announcement also notes that streaming to your own devices via is an option on United's small but growing set of –27 aircraft Thursday, . But on Friday, The Points Guy, a travel-news site, that United had turned off Starlink on those planes to fix a radio-interference glitch.
When that returns (which TPG's Zach Griff quoted United as saying will be "soon"), that will be your best inflight connectivity for streaming United's longtime theme music, George Gershwin's 'Rhapsody in Blue.' To my surprise and dismay, that Jazz Age classic isn't in any of the prefab playlists.
If the airline feels inspired to create one based solely on , it has options: A search of Spotify Friday found dozens of versions of that work, the most interesting being a bluegrass adaptation titled 'Rhapsody in Blue(grass).'
Editors' note: We revised this post extensively after giving the service an audition in the sky.
