Oh, man, finally. Years after showing Europe how a streaming music service ought to be done, and just a couple of weeks after Apple made it clear that their own iTunes-In-The-Cloud service wouldn’t do streaming at all, Spotify has officially confirmed that it will be coming to the United States within a matter of weeks.
Speaking at an ad conference in London, Spotify’s General Manager said that the streaming music darling was in the final stages of getting all the deals inked with the labels, and that he expected that the launch would happen sometime shortly after July 5th.
There’ll be compromises, though, over the European service. The music labels have been intensely skeptical of Spotify’s current model of allowing subscribers to stream ten hours of music per month for free, supported by ads. This model has led to Spotify to rack up over 10 million subscribers in Europe, 1 million of whom pay $10 a month for unlimited streaming, but that follow-through rate wasn’t good enough for the American labels. Expect the free offerings to be much curtailed over Spotify’s European offerings.
Even so, for a guy like me, who once tasted the nectar of Spotify, only to have it pulled away from me by an international move, this is all welcome news. I’m a Rdio subscriber, and I like it well enough, but it’s just not the same. July 5th can’t come soon enough.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
