Spotify Comes to America With Invite-Only Freebie; If You Want it Now, You Might Have to Pay

Spotify, the long-awaited, over-hyped streaming music service, has finally come to the United States. While its arrival has been promoted all week via YouTube GOOG, Spotify waited until today to open its doors to American music listeners. Upon visiting Spotify.com, users will be greeted by a large promo video with silly artwork, praise-filled quotes, a list of special features provided by the paid version of the site (which ranges from $5 to $10 per month), and a “Sign up for an invite” box that allows you to register your e-mail address to receive a free account – when it's available. While there has been a tremendous amount of hype for Spotify, which has become quite popular in Europe, I can't help but come to this site with an enormous amount of skepticism. Instead of offering something unique like Turntable.fm (a site that, I must admit, I was also skeptical of), and instead of promoting individual artists to entice music listeners, the site looks like one great big green blob. Praiseful quotes from Mark Zuckerberg and Demi Moore are far less convincing than the large images of artists that Apple AAPL uses to promote iTunes. I can't help but feel that the invite system is a gimmick to push users into signing up for the paid version of the service. Google+ and Turntable.fm use an invite system, but they do so without financial gain. Mostly they do it to build hype (and, in Turntable's case, to prevent too many users from bogging down the site during the beta period). Spotify is using its invitations in a whole other way. Right underneath the invite registration box, users are greeted by this message: “Don't want to wait for an invitation? Jump the queue by signing up for Spotify Premium or Unlimited, starting at just $4.99/month.” No artists. No images of concerts or music videos. No specific mention of music whatsoever. Just a monthly fee for what appears to be nothing more than a streaming music service for your PC and mobile devices. And a push to get us to spend $4.99 a month. (Thanks to TechCrunch for alerting us to Spotify's launch.) Follow me @LouisBedigian