Spotify Says It Goes Better With Coke (Updated)

Here’s the news Spotify will announce at a press event in a couple hours: A big-dollar deal with Coke.

CEO Daniel Ek made a preliminary mention of the deal during a speech at the Ad Age Digital conference and promised more details later. But we can take a rough guess at what that means right now: Coke hands the streaming music service a big check, and Spotify gives the soda company a lot of real estate.

While I’m reading tweets from the conference that talk about Spotify powering a music “platform” for Coke, I’m assuming this is a bit euphemistic.

Spotify’s deals with the music labels mean that it can only stream music via its own branded music player — it doesn’t have the ability to provide a “white label” service for other people without the labels’ permission. But I’ll ask the Spotify folks about this in a bit. (Update: Nope, no change here. This means Coke can make Spotify apps, but these will work the way everyone else’s apps work — if you want this to work, you’ve got to have the Spotify client downloaded.)

In other news: No word on a Spotify iPad app, contrary to some Web speculation over the last couple days. And as previously reported, Spotify is now letting brand advertisers offer their own apps on the service. The first batch will include offerings from Intel, AT&T and McDonalds.