Southwest Airlines passengers on the lookout for fresh tunes will have a new option on the company’s wi-fi enabled flights. Apple has partnered with the airline to provide free streaming from selected parts of the Beats Music catalog to anyone in flight, even if they’re not already a Beats Music subscriber.
Users will be able to listen to a variety of curated playlists, as well as radio delivered through Beats Music’s “The Sentence” feature, which lets users pick out a particular sentence from certain presets and creates a radio station based on those items.
It’s also a chance for Apple to expand the reach of its streaming service, which is still significantly smaller than many of its competitors like Spotify and Deezer. By offering its library for free to users on planes, Beats Music may see more growth than it would otherwise.
Apple acquired Beats Music as a part of its $3 billion acquisition of Beats’s streaming music and headphone manufacturing business. That deal closed earlier this year.
With airlines around the world looking to expand their in-flight entertainment selection, deals like this will probably become more popular. T-Mobile recently partnered with Gogo, one of the largest providers of in-flight wi-fi, to allow its subscribers to send and receive text messages while on a plane without having to pay for Internet access.
