Spotify or Pandora: Who Will take the Reins?

Spotify, the Swedish music site launched in the U.S. last Thursday, allowing American users to stream music across the nation on something other than Pandora, Rhapsody and Last.fm. Spotify had been in a long negotiation process to allow U.S. access to the popular music site. Spotify has been a huge success in the U.K. and other European countries, and has catalogued 13 million songs.

CEO and Founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, says Spotify is so good, and Wired says of the music Web site, Those who have tired Spotify know it's like a magical version of iTunes in which you've already bought every song in the world.

Others are equally as excited about Spotify's U.S. launch, as Billboard.biz said of the latest U.S. music virtual world, Spotify makes music fun again, just like the iPod did nearly 10 years ago.

What this means for U.S. based users is that there is a larger selection of music to choose from, which openly streams on the Web.

But, Spotify is not completely free. Like in Europe, the U.S. Spotify will have a three-tiered price structure, which ads the benefit of ad-free listening. $5 a month can grant a listener Unlimited access; $10 per month will grant a Premium subscription.

With the Premium package, members will be granted Spotify access on Mobile Music and Offline Mode. These options allow listeners to play any track on their mobile phone, live over the Internet, or save a playlist for off-line access .

And to work along with Spotify are 5 Web sites to make listening even more enjoyable.

Spotimy recommends music to listen to, shows the latest releases, what is hot, music ratings, reviews, and playlists. The Web site also gives Spotify Playlists with the former and current week album releases.

Biblify mashes up the latest album reviews with Spotify to create awesome playlists, by searching the Web each night for the latest album reviews from reputable sources such as The Guardian, BBC, Uncut, and more.

Playlistify enhances and simplifies music for the listener by combining iTunes playlists, Last.fm and YouTube playlists.

Tubufy offers a way to create a music video channel via Spotify playlists and albums. By copying the URI of your Spotify playlist or album, Tubufy will automatically select the relevant music for the music selected.

New releases on Spotify shows the latest albums released within the last 7 days. The list is sorted by popularity. Beneath the album, song, or artist the site tells you where the song is available. For instance it will say Available to all Spotify users, or, Only available in France.

Pandora Radio was named in LEad411's 2010 Hottest San Francisco Companies. In February of 2011, Padora filed to become a Public company, and began trading under the ticker symbol P on the New York Stock Exchage in June.

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