Here’s Spotify! The Music Streaming Service Officially Lands In The US

Matt Burns

Matt is a Senior Editor at TechCrunch. Matt Burns is a family man first and attempts to be a writer second. Born and raised in the heart of the automotive world, only cars eclipse his love of gadgets. He previously wrote for Engadget and EngadgetHD before moving into the party house that is TechCrunch. He learned the retail side of... → Learn More

Thursday, July 14th, 2011
spotify-logo

The wait is finally over! Spotify, Euroland’s prized music service, just launched here in the States. This shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise as the company sent over pre-announcements yesterday. But here it is, complete with offline modes, mobile listening, exclusive content and, yes, even a limited, but still free user mode.

As expected, there are three levels of service including the free service plan that’s clearly designed to whet your appetite. $5 a month gets users unlimited, ad-free listening hours on the PC where the $10 plan adds in the mobile service, exclusive content and offline modes. But don’t feel like you need to hand over your credit card right away. There’s an ad-supported but free service to get you started.

Spotify previously stated that they weren’t going to launch in the US without this free service; it’s that important. Free accounts are limited to only 10 hours a month and feature advertisements. Plus free accounts are invite only right now, which seem sort of hard to come by. More on that later.

But the rest of the service is ready to go! Simply select either the $5 or $10 plan, fill in the payment info and you’ll be streaming music in no time.

Company: Spotify
Website: spotify.com
Launch Date: 2006
Funding: $183M

Spotify has created a lightweight software application that allows instant listening to specific tracks or albums with virtually no buffering delay. It was launched in the fall of 2008 and had approximately 10 million users by September 2010. Spotify offers streaming music from major and independent record labels including Sony, EMI, Warner Music Group, and Universal. Users download Spotify and then log onto their service enabling the on-demand streaming of music. Music can be browsed by artist, album, record...

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