In an interesting development, sources in the music industry say that Tesla is currently talking with major labels about creating a proprietary music service to bundle with their cars.
The full scale of Tesla’s ambitions in regards to a new music streaming service are unknown, but rumors suggest the company is interested in offering various tiers of service, one of which being a Pandora-esque web radio model.
This is an interesting move, as Tesla could choose instead to simply integrate existing music services such as Spotify into their cars, especially given that Tesla is already partnering with Spotify for Teslas sold outside of the United States.
“We believe it’s important to have an exceptional in-car experience so our customers can listen to the music they want from whatever source they choose,” said a Tesla spokesperson. “Our goal is to simply achieve maximum happiness for our customers.”
That said, if Tesla is dead set on providing music to their customers with their own platform, the market appears to be there. They delivered over 100,000 cars in January of this year alone and have already received more than 400,000 preorders for the upcoming Tesla Model 3. Label companies also seem happy to sell their music to the company.
Tesla would like as many customers as possible to adopt their streaming service, and does not want to have a world where only a handful of streaming outlets dominate the music field. However, Spotify and Apple have a clear lead in the industry, with Spotify having at least 50 million paying subscribers, and Apple claiming 27 million.
