It's Here!

This week, Spotify landed in America. What is it, and why should you care? For years now, e-business has been trying to find a successful model for providing content at zero cost to consumers, as a way to promote their products or subscription services.

Of course iTunes and Rhapsody have been offering streaming of music files with great success for quite a while now. But, in the case of Spotify, the music is being made available to cell phones and other mobile devices, for free. Spotify is significant because it comes in two flavors, free ad supported and a two tiered subscription service. The trick has always been, figuring out how to make the free service pay for it self while attracting enough consumers to make a profit from the paid service.

Ever since the introduction of the iPhone, streaming media has been increasing in it's popularity. In my opinion, nothing could replace owning your own copy of an album or single. Streaming, however offers computer, laptop, and mobile users an opportunity to access music files that may not be readily available, otherwise.

One other thing that has also been problematic, seems to solved as well. That's the issue of paying artist for the use of their songs. Earlier this month, Soptify reached a licensing agreement with ASCAP (American Society of Composers Authors & Publishers) for the right to stream some 8.5 million musical works in ASCAP's repertory. This should not only serve to make everyone happy, but it meets the needs of everyone from the content provider to the artist and the consumer.

To try Spotify you have to be invited. You can either wait until they send you one or you can visit their website and place your email address on a waiting list. Or if you still can't wait, you can pay $4.99 a month for their unlimited tier which gets you hours of ad-free listening. For $9.99 a month the premium option gives you the unlimited hours, plus you get mobile device support and the ability to listen to music offline.

OK. Streaming is not new. iTunes is working. So why Spotify? Because it's working too. Europeans have been using it for years. If things go well here in America, it may be just the incentive to induce illegal down loaders to stop downloading illegally.