Spotify Hits the States

Jen Consalvo July 14, 2011 Tweet

Today is the day – popular European music service Spotify is now available in the US. While their mantra is “Any track, any time, anywhere. And it’s free,” they’ve done a nice job of creating demand by requiring you to sign up and wait for an invitation. What, you don’t want to wait for an invite? Fortunately, you can “jump the queue” by signing up for one of their premium accounts and get immediate gratification. Price points are the same as in the UK at $4.99 for the unlimited plan and $9.99 for the premium plan.

Scroll through Twitter and you’ll also see a number of people jumping the line via Klout, thanks to an innovative rollout partnership with the “influence measurement” company. Those with high influence scores can get a first look, while others still need to sign up on the homepage with an email and wait for an invite. But as of this writing, Klout was out of invitations for the day and telling people to come back tomorrow.

Despite all of the early excitement, will Spotify be a game changer in the US music scene? Not likely, as sites like Pandora clearly have a lead in the US market, and already we’ve seen tweets such as “using Spotify until iTunes Cloud rolls out.” But Spotify is a great competitive offering in the ever-growing list of streaming music options, which is good news for the US marketplace.