• Spotify Has Some Celebrity Friends In High Places

    Thursday, July 14th, 2011

    Leena Rao currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... → Learn More

    Twitterashton
    Twitterashton

    Music service Spotify has finally crossed the pond; arriving in the U.S. this morning. The service offered a limited number of free invites, but you anyone can start using the service if they shell out $4.99 or $9.99 per month. Twitter is actually exploding with mentions of the service. And considering all the hype behind the European startup, it’s not surprising that Spotify has already gotten a few endorsements from celebrities and musicians.

    Britney Spears Tweeted about her excitement for Spotify to arrive yesterday afternoon, and followed up with a message this morning with invites for the service.

    Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor (who also wrote the score for The Social Network), Tweeted “Finally! Spotify is coming to the US. I’ve been using this for a while and it’s great.” Like Spears, Reznor generously followed up with free invites for followers.

    Unsurprisingly, actor and tech investor Ashton Kutcher heaped praise on Spotify earlier today, Tweeting “What a relief, now that it’s legal in the US, I can finally come out of the closet about my #Spotify addiction.”

    As my colleague Alexia Tsotsis wrote a few weeks ago, for many startups, “The Celebrity Moment” is a major milestone the company’s service. That could be the case for Spotify.

    Clearly, many celebs are already fans of the service. And considering the popularity of celebrity playlists on Spotify, it should be interesting to see if U.S. musicians and celebs flock to the service to create playlists and engage with U.S. users. A Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber promotion might help drive even more traffic to the platform. I’m going to bet that endorsements from Britney, Trent and Ashton are only the beginning of the “Celebrity Moment” for Spotify.

    Company: Spotify
    Website: spotify.com
    Launch Date: December 26, 2009
    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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