Well, it's finally here. After two years of delay and a fresh $100 million round of funding, European music streaming service Spotify launched in the United States yesterday, much to the delight of music geeks, a handful of celebrities and pretty much everyone on Twitter.
In addition to a whole lot of excitement, Spotify has brought with it a number of questions. What does this mean for the future of music consumption? Will artists make money? Perhaps most importantly, is its business model sustainable?
Spotify has finally arrived in the U.S., the company announced this morning. But the full rollout is still underway. Interested customers are being asked to sign up for an invite on the company's homepage, if they haven't already done so.
But regular (and fast!) ReadWriteWeb readers wanting to cut in line can get their invite now, no waiting.
After two years of waiting, the U.S. market finally gets a chance to try out Spotify, the music-streaming service that's now wildly popular Europe. But why is there so much hype around Spotify, you may wonder? Don't we already have plenty of music streaming services here, like Pandora, Last.fm, Slacker Radio, MOG and Rdio, for example?
Sure we do. But we've never had anything like Spotify before.
Is the European music streaming service Spotify finally ready to come to the United States? When U.S. Web users visit Spotify.com they see the above image along with a field below the banner where a they can enter an email address to request an invite.
Haven't we seen this before, though? Spotify has been rumored to be coming to the shores of the New World for at least two years. It made waves at SXSW in 2010 with a rumored launch in the third quarter last year. That never panned out. Spotify inked a deal with with Sony in January of this year and as of mid-June it had deals with three of the four major U.S. music labels. The only hold-out was Warner Music. Has Spotify reached an agreement with Warner and cleared the final hurdle to bringing the service to the U.S.?
Best Buy is joining Amazon, Google, and Apple in offering customers a cloud-based storage and streaming service for digital music. Using its "PlayAnywhere" technology, the Best Buy Music Cloud will let users upload their songs to the cloud, then stream the music across multiple devices, including Blackberry, Android and iOS.
But with stiff competition from the other big companies who've entered the cloud music locker space lately, can Best Buy offer something that will make customers use its service? Based on what's available today, the answer is "probably not."
Facebook is now "getting serious about music and media," writes Om Malik on GigaOm.com, revealing unannounced details regarding the social network's new ambition to be a place to discover music with friends. The deal involves partnerships with the internationally popular music streaming service Spotify, and possibly other music services, too, currently in talks with Facebook.
Sharing music with friends? Sounds like the final death knell for MySpace, doesn't it?
European music streaming service Spotify has closed a $100 million round of funding in anticipation of a launch in North America. The round comes from DST, Kleiner Perkins and Accel.
American consumers who pay attention to the tech and music industries may have a bit of Spotify whiplash. It is coming. It didn't come. Why didn't it come? It is going to be integrated into Facebook. With this funding round, reported by AllThingsD, is Spotify finally on the boat across the pond? As consumers, do you even care anymore?
There was a lot of buzz prior to today's announcements at WWDC about the deals that Apple had reportedly struck with the major record labels. Even before any Apple executives took the stage, many industry observers had crowned Apple the heir apparent to music in the cloud, decreeing that its offerings would surely trump those recently announced by Google and Amazon.
But now that the dust has settled and the glimmer has faded from today's keynote at WWDC, we have to ask, has Apple really triumphed here? Did we see the future of digital music unveiled onstage?
The night sky has inspired people to create from the moment we as a species could see it above us. Shamans, poets, story-tellers and painters have been impelled to translate what they saw, or how they felt, as the vast bowl of the starry sky turned over them.
Nothing's changed except the technology available to do so and the avenues we have to share what we've made with each other. So on this Sunday evening, I'd like to share with you two high-tech, high-art versions of the night sky.
In the battle of cloud music services, you have a variety of options including radio service like Pandora and Last.fm, online lockers like Google Music and Amazon Cloud Drive, Internet radio stations and premium, "program-your-own" services like MOG, Rdio, Rhapsody and Zune. But what if you want it all? Then you may want to consider mSpot and its recently updated mobile app for Android.
