If you’re a music lover, you’ve probably been envious of your European friends who have access to Spotify, the cloud-based music service. Now Spotify is finally launching in America, and you can have a ton of music at your fingertips.
Spotify is an application that you can download to your computer that will give you instant access to just about every piece of music ever recorded. In this respect, it’s a lot like iTunes. But Spotify’s library is free, or at least if you don’t mind seeing ads Spotify’s best feature is its huge library of instantly playable songs.
You can also save playlists of your songs, kind of like making mix tapes back in the ’80s. (Ask your parents if you don’t know what a mix tape is.)
There are also a couple of premimum features available. You can downlaod an app for your smartphone if you want to have the world’s biggest music library at your fingertips. Also, as much as we’d hate to admit it, Internet connections aren’t always as avaialable or reliable as we’d like them to be. (I had a connection issue last week that involved a technician coming out to fix it.) Spotify will work in an offline mode if you happen to find yourself stuck without a connection.
Spotify is avaialable on a limited basis. They’re rolling it out via invites, so go to the page, enter your email address, and perhaps you’ll get lucky. If you’re really impatient, you can sign up for a premium account or an unlimited account. Their plans start at $4.99 a month, which is much cheaper then buying an album from the iTunes Music Store.
Will Spotify be as huge in America as it’s been in Europe? Will it challenge the iTunes juggernaut? Only time will tell, but the idea of an endless library of tunes is enough to make any serious music lover want to sign up.
We specuated whether Spotify would be launching in mid-July, and that’s come true. We’ve also covered Facebook possibly unveiling a social music service as well.
