The owner of the “Three” mobile operator group, Hutchison Whampoa, has taken a stake in Spotify, the streaming music service that we’ve all been hearing so much about recently.
We don’t know the amount that has been invested, but it’s been enough to get HWL a seat on the board of Spotify. Specifically, it’s the Chairman of INQ (HWLs handset division) that has the seat – so it doesn’t take a maths genius to work out that Spotify is going to get (even more of) a Mobile steer – with particular consideration to INQ I’d suspect.
One further leap in inference, and you can see the next round of INQ handsets coming with a native Spotify app on board – which would be a cool thing. If they can get some kind of semi-persistent storage going on on the devices, that would be quite excellent indeed – then you’d have music on the go, even when you were out of coverage!
[Via: Mobile Choice]