Now that we’ve got dozens of car radios able to control Pandora, Spotify is coming to the U.S.
Spotify is a “Free” music service that is hugely popular in Europe. It streams millions of ad-supported songs on demand at no charge, and has already garnered tons of media attention stateside.
There’s no official launch date yet for the U.S.; but Spotify has set up a web site to sign up users.
Spotify is considered a “freemium” service. It gives you 6 months of free ad-supported music and after that, users get 10 free hours of music per month. You are not permitted to listen to any single track more than 5 times under that plan. Then there’s a premium service that costs 5 to 10 pounds in the UK, which lets you stream to a mobile device and to access your songs off line (and without ads).
There’s no word on the service terms or premiums pricing in the U.S.
There are rumors that Facebook will integrate Spotify’s music service.
Spotify announced it had one million paying subscribers as of March, beating the previous record of 750,000 paying subscribers to Rhapsody. It has 7 million free users, again, without yet tapping the U.S. market.
Source: Technologizer
I don’t even pretend to know how the various content providers wars will come out. Pandora goes public with a business plan that shows losses for years to come. Sirius/XM proves that people like subscriber services, they just don’t want to actually make monthly payments for them. Any manufacturer that commits to offering any 1 content provider is potentially harming their ability to reach the entire market. It will get a lot messier before it becomes any clearer.