Spotify is Here! Celebrate With a Free Invitation

Spotify has landed in the US with a great deal of press coverage and speculation, but what is it, exactly?

Spotify is a streaming music service - more akin to Rdio or MOG than the randomly-generated playlists of Pandora - that has one killer feature its competitors don't. It's free. Yep, once an account is established (which is tricky at the moment - more on that in a bit), streaming is enabled for Macs and PCs through the iTunes-like Spotify desktop client. The catches are relatively minor. The free service is ad-supported, so expect to hear song snippets when you least expect them, or see an ad for Coke dominate your Spotify screen for a few seconds. Taken as a whole, however, it's a lot of content for the surprising cost of nothing.

For those wanting more, Spotify offers an Unlimited Plan for $4.95 which features unlimited streaming to PC/Mac with no ads or a Premiere Plan for $9.95 a month to stream all content to the iPhone and select other devices. If you're hurting for an invite to join the fun, you can jump to the head of the line by purchasing an Unlimited or Premiere plan...or...

You can win one of two invites to Spotify USA by helping us reach 2,000 fans on our Facebook page: www.facebook.com/148apps. Once we hit that magic number, all of our recent fans' names go into a hat for a random drawing. Two lucky winners will receive invites to the music party of the year.