If you've snagged one of those highly coveted Spotify invitations, you might feel special. A little bit cooler than your friends, even. Maybe you were proud that you didn't have to lower yourself to begging for an invite on Facebook or Twitter. But you're not exactly in an elite group. According to All Things D's Peter Kafka, Spotify already has 1.4 million U.S. users signed up its free service.
In fact, it has also secured 175,000 paid subscribers in a little more than a month after it finally launched in the U.S. Those numbers are impressive on their own, but to put it into context, Kafka notes that Rhapsody, the largest streaming music subscription service in the U.S. has 800,000 paid members. On top of that, Spotify has 1.6 million paid subscribers in Europe, where it's only available in Sweden, Norway, Finland, the U.K., France, Spain, and the Netherlands.
Kafka points out that the U.S. version of Spotify, which launched in Europe in October 2008, might give you more of an incentive to join, considering it offers users more content and doesn't yet have caps on the amount of time you can listen.
Spotify offers a lot of streaming content for free on the ad-supported version, but the company says it plans to place limits on the gratis service in the future. For $4.99 a month, you can listen to everything you get on the free version, sans ads. For $10 a month, you can access all of Spotify's tracks all the time, even offline, and you can stream songs via the Spotify Android and iPhone apps. However, another streaming service, Rdio, beat Spotify to the punch and launched an iPad app last week—so far Spotify hasn't come out with an app specific to the tablet.