Spotify Offers a 50 Percent Discount to College Students

College students in the U.S. are about to enjoy unlimited streaming music at a very good price.

Spotify is now offering a special discount to those enrolled in two-year or four-year universities, cutting its $10 a month subscription fee by half in order to encourage new sign-ups.

The $5 a month discounted plan will offer the same perks, including unlimited, ad-free streaming and mobile access, but will only be available as long as a Spotify user is a college student. Spotify will use a service called SheerID to verify a Spotify user’s enrollment.

According to Spotify’s terms and conditions on the deal, a college student can activate the discount and, if verified, can continue to subscribe to Spotify at the discounted price for up to 12 months. AT that point, the student will either have to re-apply for the discount and be re-verified, or will graduate up to Spotify’s full-price $10 fee.

This offer is not unlike a similar promotion run by Amazon. The online retailer provides heavily discounted Prime subscriptions to college students with the hope that the service will become indispensable to them. When the subscribers are no longer enrolled in college, Amazon requires they pay full price for Prime at their next renewal.

Streaming music is a pretty competitive business, and Spotify is surely taking a hit by offering such a steep discount on its service. But it’ll be worth it if just a fraction of the 20 million college students in the U.S. sign up as full subscribers. The company claims to have over 6 million paying subscribers now, but it would undoubtedly like more.

You can head over to Spotify’s dedicated student page if you’re enrolled in a U.S. school and would like to apply for the discounted Premium service.

What do you think of Spotify’s new plan to offer a discount to college students? Drop us a line below.

[via Re/Code]