American readers – brace yourselves. The most-hyped European music phenomenon since the Beatles has finally arrived. After two years’ wait, Spotify is set to open its doors in the US on Thursday.
As the FT and others reported last week, Spotify US will have an invite-only free, ad-supported service, with a $4.99-per-month ad-free version and the full “premium” experience, including mobile access, costing $9.99.
Deep Facebook integration won’t be there from the start, but expect Spotify to be pushing for tie ups with anyone from new-media darlings to old-school telecoms operators (as it did with Virgin Media in the UK last week).
It feels a long time since Daniel Ek, Spotify’s co-founder and chief executive, first proclaimed the Anglo-Swedish service’s plans to launch in America in “late summer” 2009.
The near-constant rumours of an imminent launch since then haven’t hurt its profile, of course. Now, after all the theorising, we get to find out in practice how Spotify will fare against Rhapsody, MOG and Rdio in what is a far more competitive environment than it has faced hitherto in Europe. But at least it has some marketing firepower – that $100m fundraising was contingent on securing label support for the US launch.
Spotify declined to comment, but we can expect the full lowdown tomorrow.
