Southwest Airlines can’t guarantee you’ll get the seat you want on your next flight, but starting this week you’ll be slightly more entertained wherever you end up, as the airline is introducing free Beats Music streaming on flights.
Beginning today, Southwest will provide all WiFi-enabled aircraft with a custom curated Beats Music experience that’s free for all flyers.
Beats Music will offer passengers different music programming ranging from pop to country, and hip-hop to jazz, so you can keep up with newest stuff in every genre, handpicked by Beats’ curation experts.
The move gives Apple a new way to introduce its streaming music service to new customers, after it acquired Beats for $3 billion earlier this year. Beats Music is lagging behind Spotify and Pandora in subscriptions, but Apple is rumored to be working on a rebranding of the Beats Music service so that it integrates closer to the Apple and iTunes brand.
Southwest Airlines introduced the new Beats feature at a live demonstration today that featured a Boeing 737 wearing Beats’ headphones and the tagline “don’t miss a beat” decaled on the side.
Popular Beats Music features like The Sentence as well as hundreds of curated playlists will be available on the Southwest Airlines flights, but passengers won’t have access to the full Beats catalog of music, like Taylor Swift’s old albums which were just pulled from Beats Music competitor Spotify.
