Brief:

• Wedding site The Knot partnered with streaming music giant Spotify to offer wedding playlists to listeners. Pop singer Meghan Trainor is the first celebrity to help curate "Wedding Songs by The Knot," which consists of the most popular first-dance songs, Trainor's "The Love Train" EP and additional songs selected by The Knot, per an announcement.
• The wedding playlist arrives as couples prepare to celebrate Valentine's Day, one of the most popular days of the year to get engaged. Spotify users can follow the playlist to stream updates to the collection of ballads.
• Engaged couples can add a Spotify Premium membership for $14.99 a month to The Knot Registry, an online wedding registry that is open to a wider variety of spending options than many retailers provide.

Insight:

By partnering with Spotify and Meghan Trainor, who recently got married, The Knot can target tech-savvy millennials who are in the prime age to get married. Millennials tend to favor less traditional ceremonies and unconventional venues like barns and farms, according to a separate survey by The Knot.

Music-loving couples also have the chance to add a Spotify subscription to their gift registry on The Knot, which may help to build the streaming company’s user base as it competes with rivals like Apple Music, Pandora and Amazon Prime Music. Spotify last week said it had 207 million monthly active users (MAUs), including 96 million premium subscribers and 116 million ad-supported users, as of Q4 2018. Spotify's audience is almost twice as big as Apple's 50 million paid user base for Apple Music, although the iPhone maker has a stronger presence in the United States.

The Knot's wedding playlist on Spotify arrives as couples who get engaged on Valentine’s Day start planning for their nuptials. January and February are key periods for wedding vendors as people who get engaged over the holidays start shopping. The Knot's playlist may help to keep the website top-of-mind as couples apply for gift registries and seek out reception venues, caterers, photographers and dress boutiques, among the many vendors that supply the wedding industry. Wedding-dress retailers have suffered amid falling traffic and same-store sales. David's Bridal last month emerged from a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing that helped to slash its debt by $450 million, per Bloomberg.