Why a Free Ticket to Spotify Is Worth $3

So you’ve heard everyone talking about Spotify, and now you’d like to try it yourself.

Except there’s a line outside the door, and you don’t want to wait. (Even though that line is one of the reasons you want in.)

So you have a couple options:

1) Pay up: Anyone who actually wants to hand over a credit card and start paying a minimum of $5 a month can hop onto the streaming music service right away.

2) Find one of Spotify’s launch partners, like Coke or Motorola, and see if they’ve got any free passes left to hand out.

The passes are valuable chits Spotify has provided to its launch partners, as part of a larger launch advertising package. How valuable? Well, it turns out that Spotify has put a price on it: In the marketing materials I saw last week, the music service says that those launch invites are worth $3 apiece:

Which turns out, maybe not that coincidentally, to be what Spotify invites are selling for on eBay right now (so that’s a third option, too).

[Image credit: Wikipedia]