No Spotify in the U.S. this year, label deals still up in the air

Spotify is an excellent music service. At least, it appears to be, based on what our friends in Europe tell us. North American resident, of course, are still geo-blocked from using Spotify -- though we had been promised a U.S. launch in 2010. With just under four weeks left in the year, it looks like the reports we heard in October weren't totally accurate.

In truth, Spotify is not close to closing deals with U.S. record labels. Apple was thought to be protracting Spotify's problems by playing on record industry fears of falling profits and painting the service in a bad light. Spotify has nearly 750,000 subscribers each paying $10 per month for the service, though, and the global online music biz is worth anywhere between $15 and $40 billion U.S. -- so it's unlikely that the labels won't get on board eventually. Even if profits from Spotify are comparatively small, they're better than any income when a potential listener grabs a P2P share instead of firing up a streaming app like Spotify.

When is this going to happen? Spotify CEO Daniel Ek could only say "We are definitely going to do the U.S., you'll see." But added, "I can't commit to a specific date."

Tags: apple, audio, daniel ek, DanielEk, discovery, media, music, radio, spotify, streaming, web