Spotify Takes Flight on United Airlines: Here’s What You Get

Spotify has taken flight on United Airlines–but its 1.0 appearance on the seatback screens of United’s planes is more like a Little Free Library with wings than a jukebox in the sky.

The Chicago-based carrier announced Thursday that it’s bringing the streaming-audio service to the on-demand entertainment displays aboard 680-plus aircraft. On Friday, I gave it some extended listening and viewing on a United flight from San Jose to Houston. 

On the seatback screen of that Boeing 737 Max 9, a “Spotify” category replaced the “Audio” option on the home-screen menu. That offered selections of podcasts, what United’s press release calls “specially curated versions of Spotify’s most popular playlists,” and audiobooks–all, United explained, cached locally for now instead of relying on often-iffy in-flight Wi-Fi. 

The selection was deepest in podcasts, with 31 available for a listen. Somebody at Spotify or United must be a fan of The Ringer’s work, because the studio founded by sportswriter Bill Simmons had 18 of those slots. Instead of that, I listened to a Wall Street Journal recap of last year’s botched Sonos update. 

I counted 15 playlists, and they proved to be more of a throwback listening experience than the “mixtape” descriptions for each suggested. The tunes in such playlists as “Good Vibes,” “Jazz Classics,” “Sunny Day,” and decade-specific mixtapes from the 1960s to the 2010s played on a loop, with no option to jump to a particular song or see which one was playing–an experience not that different from the inflight soundtrack options of two decades ago. 

The first song on the “Jazz Classics” playlist is on brand for inflight listening. (Credit: Rob Pegoraro)

The audiobooks category had 13 titles, many of which would require more than one flight to listen to. Easy Money, the 2023 deep dive into cryptocurrency scams by Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman, would have run 633 minutes, so I had to content myself with hearing one chapter. 

That part will become more useful next year, when United plans to add a feature that will allow passengers with Spotify’s app on their devices to log into their accounts within the seatback screen. That should make it easier to resume and pause listening to Spotify’s longer-form content.

The video podcasts that Spotify began offering in 2020, however, lurked under the home-screen menu’s “TV” heading. The 13 video podcasts available included a handful of Joe Rogan’s episodes, but not any of the more notorious vaccine- or election-denying guests of Spotify’s high-paid host; other video hosts include Amy Poehler and Trevor Noah.

The United aircraft with Spotify onboard include international-service planes with Polaris business-class cabins (which also feature screens throughout economy) as well as an increasing number of narrowbody planes that have received a set of upgrades that include screens at every seat with Bluetooth audio for wireless headphones. 

A database maintained by aviation enthusiasts shows that the airline has brought those “United Next” interiors to 57% of its narrowbody fleet.

Starlink Grounded (for Now)

United’s announcement also notes that streaming to your own devices via Spotify’s apps is an option on United’s small but growing set of regional jets with SpaceX Starlink satellite broadband–27 aircraft Thursday, per the same external database. But on Friday, The Points Guy, a travel-news site, reported that United had turned off Starlink on those planes to fix a radio-interference glitch.

When that returns (which TPG’s Zach Griff quoted United as saying will be “soon”), that will be your best inflight connectivity for streaming United’s longtime theme music, George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” To my surprise and dismay, that Jazz Age classic isn’t in any of the prefab playlists. 

If the airline feels inspired to create one based solely on Gershwin’s gift to the world, it has options: A search of Spotify Friday found dozens of versions of that work, the most interesting being a bluegrass adaptation titled “Rhapsody in Blue(grass).”

Editors’ note: We revised this post extensively after giving the service an audition in the sky.

About Rob Pegoraro

Contributor

Rob Pegoraro writes about interesting problems and possibilities in computers, gadgets, apps, services, telecom, and other things that beep or blink. He’s covered such developments as the evolution of the cell phone from 1G to 5G, the fall and rise of Apple, Google’s growth from obscure Yahoo rival to verb status, and the transformation of social media from CompuServe forums to Facebook’s billions of users. Pegoraro has met most of the founders of the internet and once received a single-word email reply from Steve Jobs.

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