Spotify the European based service which could well be the future of music streaming is rumoured to be making a move to the USA. Currently Spotify is available in Sweden, Spain, Norway, Finland, France and the UK. A launch of the service in the U.S has said to have been delayed so far, due to fierce negotiations with record labels over the price users will pay for the service, with some experts claiming that the revenue Spotify generates through advertisement will not be enough to support a release of Spotify in the U.S.A.
There has been a lot of a talk recently about how much it costs to run Spotify and who gets paid what. An article in the Guardian last October suggested that 'If all 5 million users are listening to 70 minutes per month (the supposed average), license costs alone are £3m per month.’
The basic premise is that a lot of costs are per track and Spotify could simply not be able to afford the costs racked up by the millions of users that are bound to sign up in the U.S.A. if Spotify proves to be anywhere near as popular as it is here in Europe.
Thankfully though, Google have been in talks with Spotify to release a version of the music service which will run on the Android mobile application when the Google Nexus One phone is released in the U.S. on January 5th
Already available in the UK on handsets such as T-mobile's HTC G1 as well as the iPhone. Spotify for Android allows users (at the cost of premium subscription) to stream music offline from their handsets.
Whether the rumours turn out to be true or not. It is likely that Spotify will shift across the Atlantic at some point in the near future and when it does it has been suggested that the number of free accounts will be extremely limited and that Spotify will follow in the footsteps of MOG and integrate music streaming with social networking, something we already seeing with the ability to share Spotify play-lists over Facebook. Whatever happens it seems that this is just the beginning for Spotify and things are only going to get bigger and better, but probably more expensive too.
5 thoughts on “Spotify in the U.S.A?”
interesting article.
Spotify will definitely have to re-jig its revenue model before it spreads its wings too much, but I’m sure it won’t be long before it crosses the Atlantic.
It’s interesting to see how much is involved in the site’s running costs!
insane how big spotify got so quicky, literally all anyone seems to talk about. i reckon music streaming is the biggest thing to happen on the internet in the last decade?
I hope cost don’t go up, or even begin for the non-premium service, because of the issues in America. We shouldn’t be propping them up because of ridiculous laws and licences which we don’t suffer as badly from.
I live in USA and got my spotify premium from that shop :
http://spotifypremium.bigcartel.com/
Works perfectly , now running my iphone app in NYC , love spotify!