Spotify has raised $100 million from Digital Sky Technologies, Kleiner Perkins and Accel Partners at a $1 billion valuation in advance of its takeover of America. (That's half Pandora's valuation in its IPO.) The streaming music service is all the rage overseas, where it has a million paid subscribers (and here too, where some hackers have figured out loopholes to get around its barriers) but has struggled to secure licensing deals with U.S. labels and it took them six months to raise their funding, AllThingsD reports.

But if it can survive the battlefield of copyright law, Spotify's prospects are bright. Pandora's IPO is an encouraging sign of the viability of subscription-based streaming music services, and the company recently announced a partnership with Facebook that sounds like a prominent integration, on par with the Photos and Notes apps that come bundled with your Facebook account.

Spotify has a New York office and it's looking to hire a technical recruiter here, preferably with experience "working at a multi-national company and across multiple locations." The recruiter should have no trouble finding engineers with music experience, given all the dead music start-ups in New York. Spotify already picked up former Limewire engineer John Pavley as VP of engineering.

Unfortunately for musicians, many of whom are literally poor, the record companies are going to get the lions share.

One week into a federal grand jury trial, Michael Gorton, LimeWire’s founder, agreed to pay the Recording Industry Association of America $105 million. Gorton was already found guilty of copyright infringement, so the trial was about how much LimeWire would have to pay up, not if.

Having to pay $105 million is actually a good deal for LimeWire, since the RIAA was asking for a total of $1.4 billion.

But this is not a good deal for artists. RIAA spokesman Jonathan Lamy previously told TorrentFreak that any money awarded from piracy-related lawsuits will go towards funding more anti-piracy campaigns.

If this is indeed how the money will be spent, it doesn’t bode well for the RIAA’s faith in the effectiveness of the existing anti-piracy campaign.

Which is exactly what LimeWire’s lawyers argued – that music piracy was not invented by LimeWire and will keep happening even after people just remember LimeWire in a vague, Napster-y way.

During the trial, Gorton’s attorney told jurors that when a file-sharing service goes offline, users “just funnel into the next-best service.”

“The next best thing” is kind of a catchy name for a new file sharing service. Some savvy pirates should snap that up while the domain is still available.

But a new wave of free music start-ups is gaining momentum as the peer-to-peer services die off: ExFM, Hype Machine and Grooveshark, streaming music start-ups that are niggling around the system by keeping files in the cloud, are just a few either based in or with significant presence in New York. Viva la résistance.

The former LimeWire space was sunny with dark wood floors, and whoever decorated it had excellent taste in furniture. Lucky for any New Yorkers or New York startups who are in the market for tables and chairs, pieces of the decor are being sold on the internet.

LimeWire is selling its brown velvet Clinton sofas, a leather Abbott sofa, vintage metal carts and vintage wooden desks, green scooped Eames chairs that look like half limes, and other fixings via a Tumblr called SoHo For Sale, discovered this morning by Peter Kafka:

"We're the former occupants of a beautifully decorated SoHo cast iron, and we had great taste in furniture," is the way the site described itself as of last Friday.

 

That language disappeared from the site after Mr. Kafka started sniffing around, but the office pictured on SoHo For Sale is clearly LimeWire's. "Everything must go," the Tumblr says.

Check out 13 pieces from LimeWire's too-hip-to-be-believed furniture collection.

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries