Spotify, a Swedish-based music streaming service that boasts a large list of artists in its catalog, is coming to the United States in the upcoming months, Amy Lee from the Huffington Post reports. The program, founded in 2008, has only been available in parts of Europe for the last 3 years, yet it has over 10 million users, with at least one million paid subscriptions among them. With its ability to specifically choose which songs to play and share (as many times as you want, with the unlimited and premium plans), Spotify could be the first real threat to iTunes in years. The ubiquitous Sean Parker, of Napster, Facebook and “The Social Network” fame, was quoted saying that it was “The realization of the dream we had with Napster” and “Really, really cool”. The ways that it can separate from the current market for music will be where it will draw attention.

Library

Spotify gives their users the ability to access over 13 million tracks from artists, and that number is rapidly expanding each day. With the ability to search for songs, cover songs are available for the artists whose music aren’t available yet.

Instant Play of Songs

Unlike streaming music sites like Pandora and Grooveshark, Spotify gives users the ability to play exactly the song they’re looking for, instead of listening to a channel modified around the artist. If you want something like that, Spotify offers it, too.

Sharing Capabilities

In Europe, Spotify is integrated with Facebook so that users can share playlists and look at their friends’ most played artists and tracks. Playlists also have the capability to be dragged into emails and instant message conversations, further speeding the sharing of all music. Music can also be imported from iTunes or local files on computers, giving Spotify users full ability to combine all of their own files with what they get from the service.

Conclusion

Spotify is expected to charge around 10 dollars a month once they launch in the United States, which would be on par with most music streaming websites already in America. Some of its features won’t revolutionize the digital music genre, as buying and streaming music online has been established for nearly a decade now. But there seem to be enough small upgrades from what iTunes and other music sharing services offer that it has a strong chance at viability in the United States. But with its launch date still up in the air, we’ll just have to wait and see.