Spotify lands in the United States, Android app imminent

Popular music startup from Sweden called Spotify today kicked off its long-expected US operation. “We’re massively excited to be here”, the company wrote in a blog post. Spotify has been a huge hit in the UK and several other European territories such as Finland, France, Netherlands, Norway, Spain and Sweden, with a total number of subscribers in Europe topping 10 million people. The company is planning a major push to get the word out, lining up exclusive launch partners such as Coca-Cola and Sprite, Chevrolet, Motorola, Reebok and Sonos. “These brands will be launching innovative campaigns in partnership with Spotify in the coming weeks and months”, Spotify says.

Spotify lets you stream songs free of charge, with adverts, to your computer or pay a single-digit monthly fee for unlimited, ad-free streams in high fidelity (384Kbps). A Premium account is required to stream music via the Spotify app on smartphones. Music streams on demand via wireless hotspots or 3G cellular networks so you don’t have to have gigabytes of free storage to keep the files on your device.

The company celebrated launch in the United States with the release of the free Spotify for iOS app. While Spotify for Android is not yet live in the US Android Market, we expect it anytime soon so stay tuned. Why you’ll love Spotify? Because for just ten bucks a month you can play songs from their catalog of more than fifteen million tracks to your phone or computer. That’s a sizable collection even by iTunes’ standards.

And for half the price you get a Spotify Unlimited account which removes ads, but lacks other features and encodes audio in standard quality. Premium accounts can mark entire songs, playlists or albums for offline listening  when there is no network coverage.

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