exploremusic

When the music streaming service Spotify launched in the U.S. in July 2011, lots of people signed up for six-month free memberships that allowed them to listen to anything they wanted to as often as they wanted to on their desktops.

Those free memberships expired almost two weeks ago (January 14th), and those users are now limited to ten hours of streaming a month and no more than five plays of any one track, so it’ll be interesting to see how many of the people that were getting the “all you can eat” service for free liked it enough to pay $4.99 a month for the same thing or $9.99 a month for the mobile membership.

If you can part with the idea of owning music, five or ten bucks doesn’t seem like a lot to pay for unlimited listening, although some artists and labels are holding out from putting their music on the database. They want to get paid more, apparently.