Spotify to launch in the US

Spotify has finally announced what many had hoped for: the spotify service will be launching in the US imminently. There is no such date, but the website is already accepting sign-ups to notify those interested when it goes live, so we don’t expect it to be too long.

It seems that this adds some weight to the recent rumours that Spotify had finally confirmed deals with all of the major labels it needed to. It’s unknown how much Spotify will charge for US customers, but presumably they will keep the free subscription levels. Although the ad-supported free accounts Spotify offers amount to as much an incentive to upgrade to a premium account as they do a revenue source but its possible that the US labels won’t be quite so willing to give away their music for free effectively.

Aside from its position in the streaming music market it will be interesting to see how Spotify fare against the fast growing wave of cloud music services, especially with Google, Apple and Amazon trying very hard to get customers to buy music.