Southwest Airlines now offers Beats Music for free during flights

It wasn’t very long ago that airlines offered a dozen or so pre-programmed radio stations you could shuffle through during your flight. Fast forward to 2014 and things have really changed. Starting today, Southwest Airlines is teaming up with Apple and Beats Music to offer the music streaming service on all Wi-Fi enabled planes. Southwest Airlines will provide free access to hundreds of Beats Music-curated playlists across a large selection of music genres and artists, though the full on-demand service that allows you to search through millions of tracks and albums is not available for all.

Airplanes are becoming more like electronics retail stores, where you can try things out before you buy them. The latest example is Southwest Airlines, which will allow passengers to test-drive Apple’s Beats Music for free on its aircraft equipped with an Internet connection. Southwest said that starting on Monday, people flying Southwest with tablets and smartphones could use Beats Music free over its in-flight Wi-Fi network. When passengers first connect and open a web browser, Southwest’s webpage will show a prominent Beats Music button. From there, Beats will ask some questions about the listener’s location, mood and musical preferences to make a playlist automatically. After three songs, Beats will ask for the passenger’s email address to keep listening. From there, passengers will probably receive some emails from Beats Music including more information about signing up for the service, according to a Southwest spokeswoman. Airplanes are becoming sort of a venue for tech and mobile companies to promote new products and services. T-Mobile US recently announced a partnership with Gogo, a provider of in-flight Wi-Fi, to offer T-Mobile subscribers access to free messaging services and voice mail over the Wi-Fi network.