A year has 525,600 minutes. Matt Suda spent 206,989 of them — more than a third of last year — listening to Spotify.
Suda was one of the earliest customers to get his hands on an invite-only release of Car Thing, Spotify’s first-ever hardware device, which goes on sale Tuesday. Unlike him, you probably didn’t spend more time streaming music than sleeping last year. But Spotify is betting that Suda and about 140 million of you have something in common: Your car doesn’t have a fancy infotainment system to rival a Tesla’s.
“I was just interested in seeing Spotify’s take on actually building their own hardware,” said Suda, a 26-year-old student in Houston, who drives a 2012 Honda. “I wasn’t expecting a whole lot. But getting the device and using it — you can understand more the problem they’re going after.”
Spotify’s main listening location is the home, but the car is a close second, said Gustav Söderström, Spotify’s chief research and development officer. He says Americans spent an “insane” 70 billion hours a year on the pre-pandemic road. But while roughly 50% to 70% of cars on US roads may be able to connect to a phone, they’re not so fresh-off-the-line as to have an entertainment display that easily streams tunes and podcasts.
To Spotify, that meant drivers in roughly 140 million cars might stream Spotify more — or start paying for it if they don’t already — if a device could replicate Apple’s Car Play or Android Auto for them.
“Why would we do something ourselves here?” Söderström said. “If this already existed, we wouldn’t have.”
Enter Car Thing.
Car Thing against a bright yellow background
Sarah Tew/CNET
It may look like a bit like a sideways ZuneMicrosoft’s failed music player that launched in 2006. But with a credit-card-size touchscreen, mics to pick up voice commands, five buttons and a dial, the $90 Car Thing is a souped-up Spotify remote control for your ride. It mounts to your dash, with the goal of bringing a better way to safely stream music to drivers missing one of those fancy infotainment systems — no dashboard teardown or new car required.
When Spotify first unveiled Car Thing in April, more than 2 million people signed up for its waitlist. The earliest people invited to try it got it free; by fall, people had to start paying $80. On Tuesday, it’s finally going on sale in the US, with a $10 price hike to $90.
Currently, Car Thing works only with Spotify’s premium tier. That means on top of the $90 you pay for the hardware, you also must pay for a Spotify membership. Its standard subscription is $10 a month, though it comes as cheap as $5 a month for students.
So Car Thing is only for Spotify — but only for now.
Its software is on track for an update in “a few weeks” that will unlock it to control other audio apps, Söderström said. If you love Audible, Car Thing will be able to play, pause, skip and adjust volume for your audio books. The update will even allow Car Thing to work for services that are Spotify’s direct competitors. “We want to be an open platform,” he said.
That openness could, eventually, extend to “deeper integrations with potential partners” if Car Thing takes off, he added. While Spotify wouldn’t elaborate on future partnerships, a Car Thing that could toggle between Spotify and Google Maps or Waze would give it the one-two punch of both music navigation and, well, literal navigation.
“Why would we do something ourselves here? If this already existed, we wouldn’t have.”
Gustav Söderström, Spotify chief research and development officer
Broadening Car Thing may be wise, because those 140 million cars may be a more niche market than it seems, according to Tatiana Cirisano, a music industry analyst and consultant at researcher MIDiA. Just 22% of US consumers stream music in the car.
“Streaming services are battling for market share over this relatively small demographic,” Cirisano said.
With sales opening in the US on Tuesday, Spotify is about to start learning: Is Car Thing tapping into a caravan of unmet need for millions of drivers? Or is it driving headlong toward a dead end?
But as vehicles steer toward a future of being more autonomous, anything Spotify can do to solidify itself as the must-have music service in the car may pay dividends down the road.
“Full autonomy is probably the most elusive goal of all, but the dream is: You get into your car and all the windows turn into displays,” said Edward Sanchez, a senior automotive analyst at Strategy Analytics. “That’s what everyone’s salivating at the prospect of.”
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