• by Gavin O'Malley , Staff Writer @mp_gavin, June 19, 2012

Spotify -- which already lets users listen to music for free and on demand -- has finally launched its own bona fide Web radio service. “That is, this is a ‘real’ Web radio service, that comes with advertising, unlike iterations Spotify has released in the past,” AllThingsD points out. The service is a lot like the one already offered by Pandora, which as AllThingsD notes, is bad news for Pandora.

“Here’s the key takeaway: Spotify now has an option that lets people use the service for free, on mobile devices. Up until now, the only way to get Spotify on the go was to pay $10 or more per month, while Pandora’s key selling point was free mobility.” To date Pandora has consistently argued that it hasn’t seen any impact from Spotify’s U.S. launch last summer. Now, that’s almost certain to change.

Put another way, “Spotify now has a chance to expose many more people to its product, in the hopes of eventually converting some of them to paid subscribers.” Like most Web radio offerings, Spotify’s new service is “DMCA compliant,” which means that it doesn’t need permission from music owners in order to roll it out.