When giants come together the numbers can be quite staggering.
Last night Barcelona and Spotify confirmed what will be one of the largest sponsorship deals of this or any other year, signing a four-year deal that is believed to be worth something in the region of €300 million.
Spotify will become the main commercial partner of the Club and its official audio streaming partner from July 2022.
The familiar brand will appear on the front of both men’s and women’s team shirts and training shirts beginning in the 2022-2023 season.
In a statement issued from the streaming company, they said that “Spotify and FC Barcelona will work together to create opportunities for the iconic shirt to be a space that celebrates artists from across the world. Spotify will also become Title Partner of the Stadium with the historic Camp Nou stadium rebranded Spotify Camp Nou.”
Spotlight
Additionally, Spotify will use the partnership to shine a spotlight on artists from all over the world. This will bring the worlds of music and football together, giving a global stage to players and artists at Spotify Camp Nou.
The partnership plans are subject to the ratification of the Barcelona Members Assembly, which will take place in early April.
Speaking through Spotify’s own media channel For the Record last night Spotify’s Chief Freemium Business Officer, Alex Norström, said that:
“It’s about connecting fans with artists of every kind – players and artists, music and sports.”
“Barcelona fans and audio lovers on Spotify will come together to form a massive, globally-connected community bridging the worlds of music and football. The vision for the partnership is to create a new platform to help artists interact with Barcelona’s global community of fans.”
“As we look to grow the Spotify brand worldwide, there are few partners that have this sort of scale and global reach. Being able to connect music and football fans from Barcelona to Mumbai, Jakarta to Rio de Janeiro, is really a unique opportunity.”
“Spotify has never undertaken a partnership at this scale before, but we realized that the magic is approaching ambitious projects at this scale. We’ve always used our marketing as a platform for artists, so it’s adding another huge stage, literally a stadium, to help artists interact with fans around the world.”
Scale
Spotify had 406 million active monthly users in the last quarter of 2021, with 180 million of them on some form of paid subscription.
Its Q4 revenue was €2.69 billion, a growth of 24 per cent year on year. It did make a small operating loss for the period, but when the market dominance is that strong the financial future of the company looks like a good bet.
While Barcelona, as a fan-owned club, always used to say that it would never have a sponsor on its shirt front, those days have long passed.
Qatar Airways broke the mould and Spotify will replace Rakuten on the shirt as a result of this deal.
Spotify’s business model being global and relatively clean from a CSR and environmental perspective puts the club in a good spot as opposed to engaging with sovereign wealth funds and oligarchs, the drawbacks of both which have become evident in recent months.
