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Sony has announced that it's ditching its current Music Unlimited service in favour of a new music hub called PlayStation Music this spring, with Spotify on board as the exclusive partner. The service will launch on the PS3 and PS4 first, with Xperia smartphones and tablets following shortly after.
Sony promises that more than 30 million songs and 1.5 billion playlists will be available when PlayStation Music begins, and you'll also be able to listen to music while playing games on your PS4, allowing you to have an alternative soundtrack pumping through your headphones while you play.
To make things a little easier, PSN users will be able to link their accounts to Spotify so they can log in with their existing ID. You'll also be able to listen to existing playlists from current Spotify users as well as Spotify-curated playlists.
You won't have to subscribe to Spotify to use the service on PlayStation Music either, as Sony's confirmed that both the free and premium version of Spotify will be available. However, the free version of Spotify is still powered by ads, so only Premium subscribers (which currently costs £9.99 a month) will be able to listen to their music uninterrupted.
As a result, Sony will be closing its rather unpopular Music Unlimited service on March 29th 2015 in all 19 countries that it's currently operating in. However, Sony says that nearly all these countries will be among the 41 markets that will be getting PlayStation Music instead, which includes the US, Canada, Mexico and Brazil. To help sweeten the deal for anyone who still has an active subscription to Music Unlimited, they'll receive up to 30 days free access to the service from February 28th 2015 until it closes on March 29th.
PlayStation Music will mark the first time Spotify has been available on a home console, as it's yet to make its way to Xbox One and the Wii U. Whether Spotify's service will remain a PlayStation exclusive is currently unknown, but it's still a significant win for Sony as the company continues to bolster its home entertainment services on its home consoles.
