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Comment by joshfinnie | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have a guess as to why they are doing an "invite only" style opening here in the US? I would think with their success abroad, the infrastructure is strong enough to support the added subscribers...

Is this just to increase artificial demand?

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> Does anyone have a guess as to why they are doing an "invite only" style opening here in the US?

They're not - you can pay for a premium or unlimited subscription right now. I've just purchased one for my brother in NY, so I can share playlists with him from London.

IIRC free accounts remained invite-only for a long time after they first introduced premium subscriptions in Europe.

It certainly is a marketing tactic but it can also be more. Spotify is based on P2P-tech and maybe they want to slowly ramp up the network.

Most of the servers are also located in the UK AFAIK and the first 30 seconds are always streamed from their servers. Managing demand could be a reason.

I'd be extremely suprised if Spotify didn't have servers in the US for this release.

They've got servers in the US too.

Considering the amount of invites available (almost every premium subscriber has 50+ invites) I doubt it is more than a marketing strategy.

It's not just to create scarcity, but for people who want to try it and aren't creative enough to go find an invite, it probably means higher conversion into paid subscriptions.

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