Spotify Makes U.S. Debut With Paid Plans and Invite-Only Free Service

[iMule]

AT&T's towers are shriveling with fear right now. Unlimited data, a car charger, and an auxiliary cable, I am going to use the hell out of this.

See, I get drunk on the weekend, get on iTunes and buy songs like I'm sampling Teriyaki chicken at a food court. Now, I don't have to. There was a point in my life where I downloaded illegally. That's over. This is awesome. Apple needed to purchase Spotify. Google would ruin it information collecting, Microsoft would cheese it up, but Apple could really bank on this.

I think Spotify is going to change music forever. iTunes match is $25 a year just to match whatever music you've already bought. How cool is it to have almost every song imaginable at your finger tips?

It's amazing to see people "blah-ing" this.

 

[Spoony]

AT&T's towers are shriveling with fear right now. Unlimited data, a car charger, and an auxiliary cable, I am going to use the hell out of this.

See, I get drunk on the weekend, get on iTunes and buy songs like I'm sampling Teriyaki chicken at a food court. Now, I don't have to. There was a point in my life where I downloaded illegally. That's over. This is awesome. Apple needed to purchase Spotify. Google would ruin it information collecting, Microsoft would cheese it up, but Apple could really bank on this.

I think Spotify is going to change music forever. iTunes match is $25 a year just to match whatever music you've already bought. How cool is it to have almost every song imaginable at your finger tips?

It's amazing to see people "blah-ing" this.

I agree with all of the above. I am a chronic drunk iTunes purchaser. I just genius around that thing to recommedned artists and 20 bucks later I own a bunch of obscure songs.
Why didn't Apple buy this service?

I can see my iTunes purchases shrinking with this. This is way better than Pandora. yeah people blah-ing this is strange. I've never used the other streaming services so maybe they are blah-ing b/c it's not new to them. This is new to me and I'm sure new to a lot of people.

 

[doctapeppa]

Not sure why people are marveling at the idea of having music available that's not pandora. This is not new.

Has no one heard of Grooveshark, Rhapsody, Rdio, Napster etc?

 

[LoganT]

I think I might jump off a bridge if I hear about Grooveshark again. It's worse than the "OMG, you haven't seen The Wire?!" guy.

 

[doctapeppa]

I think I might jump off a bridge if I hear about Grooveshark again. It's worse than the "OMG, you haven't seen The Wire?!" guy.

Care to elaborate?

 

[D-Love]

No AirPlay functionality?

Gonna have to have that before I can even think about subscribing.

MOG has Airplay. At least over the iPhone.

 

[LoganT]

Care to elaborate?

GrooveShark will probably be shut down. As far as I know, it isn't exactly legal. I mean, why do you think they require you to jailbreak your iPhone for their mobile application? Probably because Apple wants nothing to do with them.

 

[PurrBall]

GrooveShark will probably be shut down. As far as I know, it isn't exactly legal. I mean, why do you think they require you to jailbreak your iPhone for their mobile application? Probably because Apple wants nothing to do with them.

They've been around for years and are completely legal. Their app was pulled because Universal had a fit with the licensing (iirc)

 

[adwebinc]

Anyone else having trouble connecting to spotify.com? Signed up for it this morning, but trying to get the app loaded on my iMac and get get to the website. Did we already crash their servers?

 

[marksman]

Anyone know if you buy the service if you get any free invites to send out?

 

[LoganT]

Anyone know if you buy the service if you get any free invites to send out?

You do, I got 4.

 

[3460169]

Anyone know if you buy the service if you get any free invites to send out?

Yes you get two invites... on the premium plan anyway. Not sure about the unlimited.

Edit: should note that I initially bought the 4.99 plan (a brainfart) & and immediately upgraded to premium. Perhaps the two invites I have (as opposed to the 4 the other poster has) are because it was initially the 4.99 plan. /shrug

 

[LoganT]

Yes you get two invites... on the premium plan anyway. Not sure about the unlimited.

Edit: should note that I initially bought the 4.99 plan (a brainfart) & and immediately upgraded to premium. Perhaps the two invites I have (as opposed to the 4 the other poster has) are because it was initially the 4.99 plan. /shrug

I was unlimited from the get go. So yeah, you're probably right.

 

[TraceyS/FL]

Yes you get two invites... on the premium plan anyway. Not sure about the unlimited.

Edit: should note that I initially bought the 4.99 plan (a brainfart) & and immediately upgraded to premium. Perhaps the two invites I have (as opposed to the 4 the other poster has) are because it was initially the 4.99 plan. /shrug

I did the same thing, but the renewal in 2 weeks is a better date for me anyway, so it all works out.

Anyway, I also only got 2 invites.

 

[shotts56]

AT&T's towers are shriveling with fear right now. Unlimited data, a car charger, and an auxiliary cable, I am going to use the hell out of this.

I had the same idea, and it works great until you drive anywhere out of a built-up area and the 3G signal just dies. In my daily commute from Glasgow to Edinburgh, I have no 3G signal for about half of it, so it still isn't really practicable for me.

 

[LoganT]

I had the same idea, and it works great until you drive anywhere out of a built-up area and the 3G signal just dies. In my daily commute from Glasgow to Edinburgh, I have no 3G signal for about half of it, so it still isn't really practicable for me.

Why don't you just make the songs available offline?

 

[forgetaboutpro]

AT&T's towers are shriveling with fear right now. Unlimited data, a car charger, and an auxiliary cable, I am going to use the hell out of this.

See, I get drunk on the weekend, get on iTunes and buy songs like I'm sampling Teriyaki chicken at a food court. Now, I don't have to. There was a point in my life where I downloaded illegally. That's over. This is awesome. Apple needed to purchase Spotify. Google would ruin it information collecting, Microsoft would cheese it up, but Apple could really bank on this.

I think Spotify is going to change music forever. iTunes match is $25 a year just to match whatever music you've already bought. How cool is it to have almost every song imaginable at your finger tips?

It's amazing to see people "blah-ing" this.

It's only because they haven't tried it.

I was skeptical a year ago and couldn't imagine life without it now. itunes match has nothing on this.

Welcome to the party!

 

[Ygn]

I live in the UK and have been using Spotify for the last few years, alternating between premium and unlimited. It's definitely worth the money, although I don't often listen to much music through my iPhone so I stick with the unlimited plan.

 

[AAPLaday]

Spotify has 70,000 US paid subscribers already?

http://www.neowin.net/news/spotify-...tor?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

 

[Cynicalone]

I got my invite today.

The signup process was super simple. Then I downloaded and installed the app. That took about a minute.

Then setup up last.fm and I was off and running.

This seems like a very well made product. I have no idea how they are going to make money but it is really well done.

On Lion it is running in the background and only using about 60MB of RAM.

The only flaw I can see in this is AT&T and Verizon will kill you on the data charges on the go.

 

[Mak47]

I got my invite three days ago and subscribed to the premium package right away to give it a try.

Sorry, but it's not impressive. I'm a fan of owning my music, I'd never rely entirely on a streaming service, but I thought this might be a really good way to find new artists and have a chance to listen before I buy--and I do buy a lot of music.

Unfortunately it's not. When you open the app you can see your playlists, your favorites, your existing iTunes library and a search option. You can also see the half dozen or so most popular songs. There's no way to browse new releases, by genre or anything of the sort. It's pretty disappointing in that regard.

Online streaming isn't really all that big of a deal either. My entire library fits on my iPhone--what do I need to stream exactly?

For someone with a huge library this might be a cool thing, but it really doesn't offer anything special. It is an inexpensive way to access a huge catalog (though the mobile catalog is smaller), but searching for songs while driving instead of just scrolling through an iPod or iPhone doesn't make a lot of sense.