“Popular music streaming service Spotify has officially announced it is coming to the U.S. ‘soon,’ but no date has been given for when the service will launch and compete with Apple’s iTunes Music Store,” Slash Lane reports for AppleInsider.
“Spotify launched a new page on Wednesday to announce that the service is coming to America. It boasts that users will be able to access ‘any track, any time, anywhere’ for free,” Lane reports. “‘The award-winning music service that’s taken Europe by storm will soon be landing on US shores,’ the page reads. ‘Millions of tracks ready to play instantly, on your computer and your phone.'”
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Lane reports, “Spotify offers cloud-based music streaming with more than 8 million tracks for free with advertising support. For $15 per month, users can access the service with no ads, and download thousands of songs to an iPhone or Android handset for offline use… Later this year, Apple will offer iTunes Match, which will scan a user’s iTunes library and match songs with those on Apple’s own iTunes servers, allowing them to be downloaded or even replaced with higher quality copies for $24.99 per year.”
Read more in the full article here.
The plot thickens!
Sounds interesting, might be worth checking out…
At 15 bucks a month??
it’s free with ads. $15 without.
(Yawn) Now we’ve got the “iTunes killer”???
Recently I have noticed upon launch of iTunes the automatic downloading of iTMS tracks of music I have ripped from CDs I own. Has Apple been testing it’s service on some of it’s customers?
FYI: “it’s” = “it is”
FYI: “it’s” is actually correct.
Fail.
Um, no, “it’s” is not correct in this context.
With “it”, the apostrophe is not possessive. It is a contraction.
The car ran its heart out. It’s not a bad thing.
Here in the UK, Spotify’s been around for a while. To have anything like a useful service from it, you have to pay for ‘premium’ – which ends up being £120 a year for essentially just a streaming service. You can ‘save playlists’ for offline use (with Premium only), but in no way do you own the music – nor can you transfer it outside of the app.
They previously offered a free version, which had ads every 5 songs and couldn’t be used on mobile devices, but even this version now limits each song to only 5 listens before you can’t hear it again – which has essentially killed its functionality.
The music selection’s limited to just the more commercial tracks, and when your costly subscription runs out, you’ll have no music to show for it. For people that are into music it’s way too limited, and for people who have a casual interest, it’s far too costly.
I agree. The ad-supported service was great- it would almost always come up with the goods no matter how obscure a band you searched for. But the new restrictions- seemingly a heavy handed attempt to coerce faithful users into subscribing to the premium service, has had the exact opposite effect on this one.
It was good while it lasted. Sigh.
In other words it won’t have much effects on iTunes, because Pandora has been around and has not affected iTunes all that much.
Pandora does not play tracks on demand.
Excellent analysis indiemuppet. Thanks from those of us who aren’t very familiar with Spotify.
It’s great for anyone who either wants to check out a band without commitment, or just wants streaming music for background, but for anyone else who really loves music, ‘renting’ it is pointless, with iTunes, or CD’s, you *own* the music you’ve paid for. And streaming music on an iPhone or Pad? Great if you have wifi wherever you go, otherwise the data cap most networks have will totally bite you in the ass.
500Mb/month? That gets me five days listening to three hours/day of BBC 6Music. Big frakkin’ deal.
Who needs Spotify when we’ve already got MOG? I’ve been using MOG on my iPhone for a month now to stream or download unlimited, 320kbps songs and they have over 11 million in their catalog! $10/month. Plays on Sonos, Roku, Web, iPhone, Android. Love it. http://goo.gl/iLvxi
Sorry I’ll stick to iTunes or CDs. I want to buy and keep my music thank you.
We’ve got a similar service with ad support for free here.
It’s called FM radio.
Data usage on Pandora is quite heavy. I used it for an hour driving home. It consumed 30MB of data in that time. Since my quota is only 200MB a month I can see this approach being useful on a daily basis.
We already have ad supported free music. It’s called “radio”.
And remember, the sole purpose of the iTunes store was to ensure legally downloadable music for first the iPod, then the iPhone.
I’ve been using Spotify for the last 2 years or so… since it first launched in the UK.
It’s nice to have it – it’s £9.99 a month, and it’s great at parties and great for looking up older music…
But it’s certainly no match for iTunes and there’s something about ‘owning’ your music as opposed to being able to stream (or make available offline) from their servers.
It is amazing how you can click on a song and it only takes a few seconds to play (with 3G – without 3G it plays 5 seconds then buffers a while). But there’s no way on Earth this is any kind of match for iTunes. It’s more like a longer preview of the songs you’re about to buy on iTunes.
Oh look. Spotify says, yet again, that they’re coming to the USA. And I don’t care. zzzzzzz