A tidal wave is washing over Europe, and it has already begun to transform the digital music landscape overseas. In the next few months, the company expects to make its way to the U.S.

Spotify is a program similar to iTunes that lets users listen to just about any song on demand. For free. The application takes a page from the Google model -- give a fantastic product away and plan to make money from ads.

It also has a "freemium" component -- that is a business model where the cow and milk are free, but the bells and hormones cost extra.

In order to play music on smart phones (including a spiffy iPhone app) or store songs to be played without an Internet connection, users must subscribe to Spotify Premium, a 10-euro-per-month plan. Each subscriber can sync three devices with up to 3,333 songs.

But Spotify has said in prior interviews that it expects the majority of users to stick with the free version. For that reason, U.S. record labels are skeptical, according to a recent story in the Financial Times. Subscription services such as Napster and Rhapsody have failed to attract significant followings.

The Financial Times also claims that Spotify delayed its launch in America due to roadblocks in talks with the labels here. Spotify spokesman Andres Sehr maintains that it's still on track to make its way stateside early next year, as the Swedish company has told Pop & Hiss for weeks.

Because "the U.S. is the largest music market in the world," Sehr said, "it's a long process."

Compared with the back-and-forth with European labels when Spotify was just starting out, this is nothing. "We negotiated with the record labels for two years before we launched," Sehr said.

"We've shown that we're really popular," Sehr said in a phone interview from Stockholm. "There's data, and we see how things work."

"Really popular" might be an understatement. According to firsthand accounts from folks across the pond, Spotify is practically ubiquitous in some circles. Barely a year old, the service hit the ground running in the half-dozen countries it operates in.

We've been testing the software for about three weeks. It blows the doors off of anything on the market and poses a major threat to several music services fighting for attention.