Universal Music Group announced yesterday that its Central Europe division just signed a catalog-wide licensing agreement with Scandinavian company Mentra, makers of a connected mirror similar to Lululemon’s Mirror, as well as an on-demand interactive workout service available in Norway and Sweden.
The deal allows Mentra members access to UMG’s entire catalog, and company trainers to hand-select playlists to soundtrack their classes. The company sells a connected mirror €1,300 ($1,460), dubbed Rflex, in addition to a monthly subscription, access to streaming live classes, and social networking through its digital community.
While this is Universal Music’s latest deal, in June 2021, it announced an exclusive partnership with Liteboxer, an at-home connected boxing device that gamifies the user experience through music programming.
In November 2021, Peloton and Spotify also announced a partnership involving a dedicated shelf on the Spotify Workout Hub that features seven rotating playlists from Peloton’s instructors and fitness disciplines. The fitness brand also introduced Peloton Verzuz, a yearlong music collaboration with the webcast series, created by legendary music producers Swizz Beatz and Timbaland, to offer unique classes, leaderboard voting, and music. In 2020, the iFit fitness platform upped its music game by partnering with Feed.fm to bring a broader range of music to soundtrack its workouts.
Connect the Watts’ Take
While this is a deal that, for now, is exclusive to Norway and Sweden, it’s just one more major move by an at-home fitness company to bring more music functionality to its users, which is a fairly complicated and expensive legal progress but vital to remaining competitive and bringing a truly immersive experience to members. Long gone are the days that users are content with on-demand workouts overlaid with bland, canned music. While some companies, such as Peloton, have been more astute than others in this domain, we’re looking forward to what new and creative ways fitness companies will integrate music into their services going forward. Connect the Watt‘s Bradley Chambers has long posited that beyond workouts centered on one artist or genre, for example, companies like Peloton could debut a new single or entire album on a live ride, complete with the live appearance of the artist.
Image: Courtesy of Mentra
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
