Spotify Premium now includes a free subscription to Hulu's ad-supported plan; offer available to new and existing users in the US until June 10
This is the best deal in music streaming — Spotify Premium now includes a free subscription to Hulu's ad-supported plan.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the third step in the Spotify–Hulu bundling arc: the pair started with a $4.99/month student bundle in 2017, widened it to a $12.99/month combined plan for all Premium users in 2018, and are now giving the Hulu ad-supported tier away inside Premium itself — no separate line item, open to existing subscribers until June 10.
The move matters because it converts the bundle from a priced product into a retention perk: Spotify is spending Hulu inventory rather than discounting its own $9.99 Premium rate, while Hulu buys reach among music-first subscribers who might never have paid for video separately.
First-order effects
- Every current US Spotify Premium subscriber can activate Hulu's ad-supported plan at no additional cost through June 10, instantly raising the perceived value of Premium without changing its price.
- Hulu gains a wave of subscribers sourced from Spotify's base, all landing on the ad-supported tier where their viewing generates ad revenue for Hulu.
Second-order effects
- Rival music services face pressure to match the two-subscriptions-for-one-price structure or justify why their plans carry less value at the same monthly rate.
- Hulu's standalone pricing power erodes at the low end: anyone eligible for the Spotify offer has little reason to pay full price for the same ad-supported tier, pushing Hulu's monetization further toward advertising rather than subscriptions.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, streaming subscriptions stop being sold one service at a time and start being used as cross-subsidized churn insurance — each platform embedding a partner's ad-supported tier to make cancellation costlier.
- The giveaway also accelerates the shift toward ad-supported viewing as the default exposure point for new audiences, since the free tier being distributed is precisely the one built around advertising.
The trend: Music and video streamers are folding each other's ad-supported tiers into single subscriptions to defend against churn, turning bundles from priced products into embedded perks.