After almost two years of anticipation, Spotify finally became available in the U.S. this week.
Investor Sean Parker immediately predicted that it would change the music landscape.
Maybe so.
It's got a lot of great points -- particularly the six months of free music with no listening caps (for invited beta testers).
But it's also very similar to a ton of other services that have come before. None of which have really taken the world by storm.
Here's a rundown of all the subscription music services out there today -- as well as some cautionary tales from past music services that never caught on.
Pandora is online radio, but does have a subscription service.
It took more than a decade for Tim Westergren (shown here) and Pandora to get there, but with its recent IPO filing Pandora is now the big kahuna of independent music services.
Pandora does NOT let users choose individual songs, but instead builds custom radio stations around particular songs and artists. But it does have a subscription service that lets users listen without ads. That subscription service made up only $12 million of its $90 million in revenue for the first 9 months of 2010 (the rest was advertising.)
Because Pandora is online radio and not music-on-demand, Pandora pays much lower rates than on-demand services. Even with that -- and a popular iPhone app -- Pandora lost $328,0000 in the first nine months of 2010.
Rhapsody has been doing this for almost a decade.
Rhapsody was a pioneer in subscription music services, and offers basically the same thing as Spotify -- minus the six-month free trial. But after almost a decade in business, and a big cross-promotion with MTV (which part-owned the service for a few years along with RealNetworks), it still has only 800,000 subscribers and is just starting to show positive cash flow, according to President Jon Irwin.
Irwin also notes that Spotify's free service doesn't have a mobile component, and mobile has been driving Rhapsody's growth in the last two years.
Rdio is backed by a Skype cofounder and is focused on social.
One of our favorite subscription music services, Rdio has a social focus which it thinks will give it an edge over Spotify. It's backed by Skype cofounder Niklas Zennstrom (shown here).
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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