Condé Nast Traveler and its newly acquired sibling site Pitchfork have teamed up on what it is calling a “musical magazine” for Spotify users.
Well, it’s not exactly a musical magazine, so much as a Pitchfork-curated playlist digitally linked to pages from Traveler’s summer issue, which will live on Spotify starting Monday. The print issue will go on sale on Tuesday.
According to CNT, Spotify users will get the exclusive look at the June/July issue, including the cover and eight stories. Pitchfork, which was acquired by Condé Nast last fall, has created playlists that will accompany each feature.
The cover story on places to go this summer, will have 32 songs, while all other stories will have 15 songs a piece. Users can click into the story and read the full feature as music plays.
While it sounds sort of like a slideshow with music, the point of this experiment is to reach Millennials on mobile devices, a spokesman for CNT told WWD. These users will, hopefully, become brand loyal to CNT and drive traffic glossy’s web site.
Another element to the partnership is to glean revenue from advertising. CNT pointed to branded content on Spotify to reach the affluent Millennial consumer. This includes the potential to “co-create experiences” with a brand and its audience, as well as the opportunity to push native advertising programs.
Spotify said earlier this year that it has nearly 30 million paid subscribers, which doesn’t include non-paid users. Although the digital music company has not released how many total users it attracts a month, reports put the number north of 85 million.
While CNT said it plans to continue its musical magazine experiment after the summer issue, Spotify users won’t get the first look at the magazine. CNT will release the digital and print magazine on the same day. What they will get, however, is a new nifty playlist from Pitchfork every month.