The conservative Rogan stands in contrast to the much more liberal musicians who generate the bulk of Spotify’s profits, he said. The bottom-line question should be pretty simple for Spotify, said Erik Gordon, a University of Michigan business and law professor. “This is a big moment of reckoning for entertainment and streaming platforms to see where the window is, what’s over the line.” “There’s some real self-examination to be doing beyond Joe,” Wihbey said. For artists, any increase in the number of paying subscribers is a good thing, but until the monthly fee goes up, expect the griping about royalty payouts to continue.The streaming site also has to decide whether offensive words are allowable elsewhere on its app, where songs with racist, homophobic and anti-immigrant messages are available, said John Wihbey, a Northeastern University professor and specialist in emerging technologies. It will boost the number of streams, increase the number of paying subscribers, and should make both stock analysts and record label execs smile. This is actually a brilliant move by Spotify if the device gets any kind of traction. You do have to pay $6.99 for shipping and handling but that’s still a great deal if this will bring a new streaming feature to an old auto. It will retail for $79 eventually, but there’s a $79 discount right now making your cost $0. Perhaps the best thing is that Car Thing is available virtually for free at the moment. It’s been estimated that at least half the cars on the road today are at least 11 years old, which is long before connectivity was being built in as standard so these are prime targets for the device. This is the first dedicated smart speaker just for the car and is clearly aimed at the millions of used cars out there that don’t have access to streaming built in already. The presets can be configured to download for offline listening, something that rural customers with limited internet connection will find extremely useful.

There’s also a scroll knob to quickly find a particular preset that can be set just for the device, which shows up on a nice color display.

It can be activated via “Hey Spotify,” to access playlists, songs and podcasts from a Spotify Premium account (sorry, no freebee accounts here). Car Thing comes with three different mounts, and can pair with multiple Spotify subscribers’ smartphones.

Spotify car thing not showing up