Spotify has been available for a long time in many countries, but Japan has one of the markets that the music streaming platform has not been available in, or at least until now where the company has announced that starting this Thursday, residents in Japan will be able to subscribe to their music streaming service.As expected, there will be a couple of options for users to choose from. They can opt for the free version which will feature ads, and the ad-free version that will cost customers 980 yen a month, or roughly $9.70 after conversion. It will also be launched with a new feature that will display lyrics while tracks are playing, which apparently is meant to appeal to Japan’s fondness for karaoke.
While music streaming services in Japan aren’t new, the company will be the first service to offer customers a free tier, so it will be interesting to see if Spotify has what it takes to encroach on a market that Apple and LINE are already operating in. Japan is also touted as the world’s second largest music market, with sales totaling about 300 billion yen.
The country is also still very fond of physical media and music lovers are known to still support and purchase the CD format, as well as vinyl. Speaking at the launch event in Tokyo, Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek said that the service will bring “two million artists around the world to Japan and bring the Japanese artists we all love to the rest of the world.”