Spotify wants your job to offer paid Premium memberships as a perk

Gym memberships, metro passes, wireless discounts, and even pet insurance are some of the perks that employers use to entice staffers, and now Spotify is looking to put its Premium memberships on the menu.

Spotify just announced its new “Spotify at Work” program, which sees the music streaming partnering with companies to offer its paid Premium subscriptions as employee perks, right alongside Summer Fridays and on-site acupuncture.

Spotify has already lined up one partner: Accenture, the digital consulting agency that has nearly 700,000 employees worldwide. For now, Accenture will only be offering Spotify as a perk in Sweden, Latvia, and Lithuania, although a company exec (as quoted in a Spotify press release) said they see “big potential” for the program on a “global scale.”

Of course, some companies already pay for their employees’ Spotify memberships on an ad hoc basis (paid Netflix is another popular employee perk), but with Spotify at Work, the streamer appears intent on turbocharging the practice. 

An obvious benefit for Spotify to push its Premium memberships as employee perks is to boost the number of its paid subscribers, even if it’s companies that are footing the bill.

While Spotify’s paid membership base isn’t cratering like Netflix’s, its growth rate appears to be slowing. The streamer reported 182 million paid subscribers during its quarterly earnings call last month–nothing to sneeze at, mind you, but while the figure marked a 15-percent year-over-year improvement, it still fell a tad short of what investors were expecting, causing Spotify’s stock price to take a hit.

Likely worried that it’s running out of willing Premium subscribers to sign up, it’s no wonder that Spotify is getting creative. And by hooking users at work who become wedded to their Spotify playlists, the streaming giant is surely hoping to keep those employees as Premium members even after they jump to new jobs.

OK, but will the employers that Spotify is wooing balk at the prospect of staffers spacing out on Spotify while on the job? For its part, Spotify at Work partner Accenture seems sanguine about the idea, saying that Spotify will help its employees to “better focus, learn, or simply unwind.”