From the Spotify website:

This is a great day for anyone who loves music in the US and, of course, a real milestone for us at Spotify. I’m proud of the fantastic team who have been working tirelessly to bring what we think is the best possible music service to our friends in the US.

During our invite-only beta phase, we’ll be offering three great services – from absolutely free to paid subscriptions. The services we’re launching today are:

- Spotify Free – the unsurpassed free music service. With an invite, enjoy on-demand, buffer-free access to over 15 million songs on your computer and great social features. Manage your own music files through Spotify, and sync with your cellphone or iPod. Features occasional advertising.
- Spotify Unlimited – all the special features of our free service, but with uninterrupted, ad-free access to Spotify on your computer. All for only $4.99 a month.
- Spotify Premium – the top-of-the-range Spotify experience. Premium gives you access to all the music, all the time. Listen online or offline, on your computer, your cellphone and a whole heap of other devices. Enjoy enhanced sound quality and access to exclusive content, competitions and special offers. Premium costs just $9.99 a month. (That’s the equivalent of a couple of fancy coffees.)

We’re launching in partnership with some of the biggest and most pioneering brands in the world, who all want to help us spread the good word of Spotify. Our exclusive launch partners are 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.

We believe that music is the most social thing there is and that’s why we’ve built the best social features into Spotify for easy sharing and the ultimate in music discovery. Even if you aren’t a total music freak, chances are you have a friend who is and whose taste you admire. I’m looking forward to connecting with some of you guys in the US through Spotify and discovering some cool new tracks.

If you’re in the US and you haven’t already signed up for an invite, feel free to do so now – we’ll send one to you as soon as we can. Of course, if you just can’t wait, you can jump the queue by signing up directly for Spotify Premium or Unlimited starting at just $4.99 a month.

Spotify’s aim from the very beginning was to make music on-demand available to all. To give you the power to listen to, discover, share and manage your music the way you want to – simpler, faster, better – while making sure the artists whose music we all love continue to see the benefits as we grow. Making Spotify available to millions across Europe has seen the service become incredibly popular. People are listening to more music and from a wider range of artists than ever before, and are giving up on piracy, which is exactly what we hoped would happen. So it’s vital that we continue offering an on-demand free service to you and millions more like you, but to make that possible we have to put some limits in place going forward. Here’s how the changes will work:

• New Spotify users will be able to enjoy our unrivalled free service as it is today for the first 6 months.
• As of May 1st, any user who signed up to the free service on or before November 1st 2010 will be able to play each track for free up to a total of 5 times. Users who signed up after the beginning of November will see these changes applied 6 months after the time they set up their Spotify account.
• Additionally, total listening time for free users will be limited to 10 hours per month after the first 6 months. That’s equivalent to around 200 tracks or 20 albums.

The changes we’re having to make will mainly affect heavier Spotify Free and Open users, as most of you use Spotify to discover music – on average over 50 new tracks per month, even after a year. Plus, the average user won’t reach the limit on plays for 7 out of 10 tracks, after a year of using Spotify.

For those of you using Spotify to find new tracks to enjoy and share with friends, these changes shouldn’t get in the way of you doing that. Rest assured that we’ll continue to bring you the biggest and most diverse music catalogue available. For anyone who thinks they might reach these limits, we hope you’ll consider checking out our Unlimited and Premium services, neither of which will be affected, plus we have a 7-day free trial for Spotify Premium that we’d love you to try. Throughout May, we’ll also have a pretty nice 30-day free trial for Spotify Premium – more details on that in the next few days. Above all, this means we can continue making Spotify available to all in the long-term. We’ll be bringing out some awesome new features as well as significant improvements over the coming months, which will make the Spotify experience even better.

“Playlists have always been central to the Spotify service and with the recent introduction of Spotify social we’ve seen millions of playlists be shared between friends and family. With millions of great playlists being created and shared we’ve looked to make it even easier for Spotify users to manage them with today’s introduction of playlist folders in this Spotify update.”

Alongside playlist folders – which up till now has been one of the most requested features - Spotify also introduces a number of other new features in this latest update, including:

Official Spotify Twitter updates will appear for all users in the Feed to keep them up-to-date on all the latest Spotify and music news

- A new look and feel for the Search view. Artist and album images are shown to make the search view more visually arresting
- Newly-added picture of playlist subscribers to the header of each playlist, so users can see at a glance who’s subscribed.
- Support for Windows 7 Snap, Jump list and Taskbar features
- Added “Send to Windows Live” option

The new version will be rolled out to users today.

Former executives from Disney and EA have joined forces to form QVIVO, a company that aims to release a free social media centre app that allow users to play and stream movies and music while interacting with their Facebook friends.

Former Disney man Jon Niermann and Liam McCallum, who were both serving as executives for EA’s Asian branch, are hoping that the QVIVO app will attract social networking addicts who want to buy, organize and stream their video and audio content.

The app is free for PC and Mac, but extenders for other devices such as phones will be paid for. It is described as ‘a free social media app for your PC and Mac. It organises your media into beautiful libraries, plays anything you can think of and even shares your fun with friends’.

(Source: Techradar.com)

Spotify has been working on a U.S. launch for almost two years, originally expecting to go live in this market in 2009. But some labels, most notably Warner Music Group, have gone on record stating their displeasure with the “freemium” model that Spotify champions, which offers unlimited streaming for free under an ad supported model designed to drive users to a premium paid service that eliminates ads and offers mobile access.

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek has insisted he wants to offer Spotify in the U.S. under a similar sort of model, with perhaps some changes to the length of time that the free version would be available.

Billboard’s sources say Spotify is open to short-term deals that would allow it to launch a framework of the service by the end of this year, designed to evolve over time as the in-dispute elements are revisited.

Find out more about Spotify here.