What Spotify Says About Music & Media

Spotify finally launched in the U.S. after 2 years' worth of false starts. Besides the usual questions about how U.S. consumers will take to it and how fast it will grow, we're struck by what this says about the music industry in general. After years of relative stasis, a flurry of new services have launched (or are about to) in just the last few months. A year ago we were talking more about consolidation and closings; iMeem, iLike and Lala were among those that disappeared over the last year and a half.

Spotify is the latest among the high-profile music launches, which include Apple's iCloud, Amazon's Cloud Drive and Music beta from Google. You can add into the mix Pandora's IPO, Clear Channel's soon-to-be-launched personalization of iheartradio and CBS' addition of personalization to last.fm. And why not throw in Netflix' transition from mail-order DVD rentals to a streaming movie service?

There's a lot going on in media delivery systems...music and other. Finally, it appears that the rights holders are finding ways to say yes to digital, instead of denying the inevitable transition.