A music service that I was waiting to land here from Europe has finally arrived and from playing around with it in a short time, it was worth the wait. Spotify enables you to play basically any track of music you like for up to 20 hours per month, for free. There’s also a nice social component to Spotify that allows you to share tracks with others on Facebook or Twitter.

That’s exciting in itself.

What’s also exciting to me is the way I received my invite. To be honest, I wasn’t sure if Klout‘s “Klout Perks” rewards program would be all that impressive right away (the $10 Subway card is cool and “Falling Skies” Survival Guide is nice, but I was looking for even more), but by giving people access to new services by virtue of having a high enough Klout score, select individuals right now can receive an invite to try out the free part of the Spotify service. Suddenly, a score that only means so much to some people gets a little more muscle to it. It means you get tangible goods and services for being strong socially. And that makes improving your Klout score more worthwhile, even if you only give so much credibility to Klout. It also opens the door for marketers to do some good segmenting and invite influentials on Klout to attend events or try product samples.

Whatever music you want, whenever you want. Free and legally. Was that so hard?

Back to Spotify – if you didn’t get an invite yet, there’s a way around the system. For an extra $5-10 per month, you can sign up for the Premium or Unlimited levels, which may be more worthwhile to you anyway, because the free level is more limited in monthly listening time.

Give it a try and let me know what you think. Don’t worry, Pandora, I’m not leaving you behind – you still help me stumble upon new artists like nobody’s business.

What do you think? Is marketing to influential people on social media networks based on their special score (Klout, PeerIndex) a worthy approach? Or is it superficial to you?