Spotify’s aim from the very beginning was to make music on-demand available to all. To give you the power to listen to, discover, share and manage your music the way you want to - simpler, faster, better - while making sure the artists whose music we all love continue to see the benefits as we grow.

Making Spotify available to millions across Europe has seen the service become incredibly popular. People are listening to more music and from a wider range of artists than ever before, and are giving up on piracy, which is exactly what we hoped would happen.

So it’s vital that we continue offering an on-demand free service to you and millions more like you, but to make that possible we have to put some limits in place going forward.

Here’s how the changes will work:

• New Spotify users will be able to enjoy our unrivalled free service as it is today for the first 6 months.
• As of May 1st, any user who signed up to the free service on or before November 1st 2010 will be able to play each track for free up to a total of 5 times. Users who signed up after the beginning of November will see these changes applied 6 months after the time they set up their Spotify account.
• Additionally, total listening time for free users will be limited to 10 hours per month after the first 6 months. That’s equivalent to around 200 tracks or 20 albums.

The changes we’re having to make will mainly affect heavier Spotify Free and Open users, as most of you use Spotify to discover music – on average over 50 new tracks per month, even after a year. Plus, the average user won’t reach the limit on plays for 7 out of 10 tracks, after a year of using Spotify. For those of you using Spotify to find new tracks to enjoy and share with friends, these changes shouldn’t get in the way of you doing that. Rest assured that we’ll continue to bring you the biggest and most diverse music catalogue available.

For anyone who thinks they might reach these limits, we hope you’ll consider checking out our Unlimited and Premium services, neither of which will be affected, plus we have a 7-day free trial for Spotify Premium that we’d love you to try. Throughout May, we’ll also have a pretty nice 30-day free trial for Spotify Premium – more details on that in the next few days.

Above all, this means we can continue making Spotify available to all in the long-term. We’ll be bringing out some awesome new features as well as significant improvements over the coming months, which will make the Spotify experience even better.

Thanks so much, as ever, for your unbelievable support and I hope to come back with some exciting news in the next few weeks.

Daniel

Update: Some users may have difficulty posting comments to our blog as we are experiencing higher than normal traffic volumes. Your feedback is important to us and we are working to restore full access to our website.

It seems like only yesterday we were hatching ideas for a new music service in a tiny office-cum-apartment with a broken coffee machine, and the party we threw having reached one million users almost two years ago today was one to remember.

So it’s with a sense of real pride and excitement that we can announce a new milestone today, having welcomed our millionth paying subscriber to the service. It’s a testament to our fantastic users who continue to support us and spread the Spotify word, either by telling friends or sharing some of the 200 million playlists that you’ve put together so far.

From everyone at Spotify, we’d like to give you all massive thanks. We’ll continue to focus on providing you with the best music service possible, and look forward to adding even more cool new features over the coming months. What’s really exciting is that this is only the beginning.

Thanks for listening!

We’re always looking for new ways to make Spotify available to as many music fans as possible, so today we’re really excited to announce that Spotify Mobile is launching on Palm’s smartphones.

If you’re using either a Palm Pre or Pixi phone running webOS then you can download Spotify from the webOS app store now, giving you all the great features you’ve come to expect from our mobile apps.

The full feature set for Spotify on Palm smartphones includes:

• Search, browse & play millions of tracks
• Offline playlists – listen to music with no mobile connection
• Wirelessly sync your local files to your phone
• View your friends’ top lists and see what playlists they’ve created
• Send & receive music from friends via the inbox
• Share music via Facebook, email and messaging
• Create, sync and edit playlists
• LastFM scrobbling

As with all of our Spotify Mobile apps a premium subscription is required. So if you’re a Palm user there’s no better time than now to upgrade.

Enjoy!

We’re rolling out an update that adds two of our most frequently requested features to Spotify. First up is Inbox Messaging - now when you send a track to a friend’s Inbox you can add a short message to let them know what inspired you to send them the track.

Also added is a much improved sharing function to send tracks to Facebook, Twitter, Windows Live and your Spotify friends. Simply right-click any track, album or playlist and select “Share To…” to open the new sharing box. If you’ve connected Spotify with Facebook you no longer need to open a browser to share tracks.

We’ve also redesigned search history and moved them up into the search bar. To drop down a list of your most recent searches click the magnifying glass icon in the search bar.

We hope you enjoy the new features!

We’ve been steadily working to add more devices to Spotify Mobile and we have an excellent addition to the family to let you know about. Earlier today our CEO Daniel took part in an event at Stockholm’s Royal Institute of Technology along with Steve Ballmer of Microsoft to announce that Spotify is now available for Windows phones 6.x!

Over the past few months we’ve been working with Microsoft to develop the Spotify app for Windows Phone and we’ve put together a demo video for you highlighting some of the great features, have a look.

The full list of features for Windows Phone includes:
· Search, browse and play millions of tracks
· Stream over WiFi or 2.5/3G - All your existing playlists are available
· Offline playlists - Play your music without an internet connection
· On-the-fly sync - Every track you add to a playlist appears on mobile and computer
· What’s New tab
· Wirelessly sync your local files to your phone
· Starred tracks - tag all your favourites into a special list

Windows Phone users can download the new app directly by visiting m.spotify.com, and it will also be available for download on Windows Marketplace for mobile shortly.

And one last thing – we’re also very excited to announce that Spotify will be available on the upcoming Windows Phone 7, which from what we’ve seen is going to be just fantastic.

This morning our friends at Sonos, the wireless music system experts, released an update to their software which includes the much-anticipated Spotify integration that we announced earlier this month. This means that the entire Spotify catalogue, including all your playlists, can now be heard through any Sonos system!

If you’re an existing Sonos user all you need to do is to get Spotify Premium to access our entire catalogue in any room of your home. If you’re an existing Spotify Premium user and considering fixing up your pad with a superb wireless multi-room audio solution, Sonos has a variety of superb music players to choose from. You can check out their web store for more information.

Also be sure to check out the video below to see how seamlessly Spotify works with the Sonos wireless music system.

Note: Spotify is temporarily unavailable from the Sonos iPhone Controller until an update is published on the App store. The Sonos App is currently pending approval.

We’ve always felt that music should be available wherever you are. Whether you’re at work, on the go or simply relaxing at home, having music at your fingertips is crucial to our users - which is why today we’re excited to introduce Spotify on Sonos.

To give you a little taste of what Spotify and Sonos can do when combined, check out the video we put together.

The Sonos Wireless Multi-Room Music System makes it extremely easy to access all your existing Spotify playlists and our entire catalogue in every corner of your home. Just put a Sonos ZonePlayer, like the all-in-one Sonos S5, in any or all of your rooms, sit back and enjoy the music.

Maybe you want to play the same track throughout your house, or mix it up by playing different tracks in separate rooms? Never a problem with Spotify and Sonos.

You can control your Sonos system from the Sonos controller, the Sonos iPhone app or from any computer and stream different tracks to different rooms of the house, all in pitch perfect sound quality.

Spotify Premium listeners will be able to access Spotify on their Sonos systems at the end of the month with an update to Sonos’ software. We’ll be sure to update everyone once it’s ready. In the meantime, be sure to visit Sonos and learn more about their great wireless systems.

You’ll just love Spotify on the Sonos wireless system.

Playlists have always been central to the Spotify service and with the recent introduction of Spotify social we’ve seen millions of playlists be shared between friends and family. With millions of great playlists being created and shared we’ve looked to make it even easier for Spotify users to manage them with today’s introduction of playlist folders in this Spotify update.

To create a playlist folder, simply go to the File -> New playlist folder or click the “+” symbol near the top left side of your screen. Once you’ve created a folder you can just drag and drop existing playlists into it and even create folders within folders to better organise your music.

Alongside playlist folders - which up till now has been one of our users’ most requested features - we’re also introducing a number of other cool new features in this latest update, including:

• Official Spotify Twitter updates will appear for all users in the Feed to keep you up-to-date on all the latest Spotify and music news
• A new look and feel for the Search view. Artist and album images are shown to make the search view more visually arresting
• Newly-added picture of playlist subscribers to the header of each playlist, so users can see at a glance who’s subscribed.
• Support for Windows 7 Snap, Jump list and Taskbar features
• Added “Send to Windows Live” option

We’ll begin rolling out the new version to users today, you’ll be automatically updated once we are able to update more users. We really hope you love the new features as much as we do!

We wanted to let everyone know about this neat Spotify Chrome extension that allows users to search and find music in Spotify directly from their browser.

Use your mouse to highlight the text with the name of an artist or group in your current web page. Click on the extension’s icon to listen to their music on Spotify.

A fun way to quickly start up music you’re reading about while surfing the web.

A lot of our developers are using Linux, obviously they want to listen to music while they’re coding away and looking at the feedback we get it appears that they’re not the only ones. So today we’re pretty happy to present a preview version of Spotify for Linux.

Built by our brilliant developers during hack days and late nights, it shares most of the same features as our Windows and Mac OS X desktop applications. Unfortunately, there are issues regarding decoding of local music on the Linux platform so we haven’t included support for local files in this version.

As a preview release this version is still unsupported, but we’re running it ourselves and will try to make sure it keeps pace with its Mac and Windows siblings. As we haven’t found a reliable way to display ads yet, this version is only available to Spotify Premium subscribers.

So how do you get it? Head over to our preview page where we’ve packaged the first release as Debian Squeeze/Ubuntu 10.04 package.

We hope you enjoy it as much as we do, and please keep the feedback coming!

UPDATE: Spotify for Linux is now also available for Spotify Unlimited subscribers.