Spotify Is Here -- Now! (Really!)

via Engadget

If you can listen to Thee Oh Sees on Spotify, how bad can it be?

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After years of waiting, something finally came*: Spotify, the Europe-based music subscription service Americans have been drooling over for a long while, is up and running in the U.S. as of today. You can go to that link, sign up, pay your money, and start listening right now.

As anyone who watches music tech news knows, this has been a long time coming. (You can track our own slow-onset Spotify hyperventilation here, here, and here.) This week's scheduled arrival of the service was only assured yesterday afternoon, when, according to the New York Times, Spotify executives finally signed a deal with Warner Music Group to license its songs in the U.S. (Warner had been the lone holdout among the big four labels in cutting a U.S. deal.)

The version of Spotify we now have isn't quite the same full free-for-all version Europe has. To get the free, ad-supported version, you have to give your e-mail address and wait for an invite. If you want to pay, though, you can sign up right now. For $4.99 per month, there's a desktop-only client; and for $9.99, the premium version lets you use the service on your mobile devices, desktop, offline, and even out of the country. Spotify says the pricier edition also adds exclusive content and higher sound quality.

We'll be checking out the service in the next couple of weeks and weighing in on how it works. In the meantime, we're glad to finally put an end to all those "Spotify is coming soon" posts.

*Sorry/thanks to Radiohead for that memorable formulation.

[various via The Daily Swarm]

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