Spotify Debuts App For iPhone & Android Mobile Users

Online streaming music startup Spotify has released a free application for the iPhone and Google Android platform after fears Apple would block the move were dispelled.

That said, the application (which bears the version number 0.3.19 rev 52867) is useless without the £10 premium monthly Spotify subscription which allows you to access more than four million tracks.

Unlike some of its competitors like Nokia's Comes With Music, the service doesn't allow you to download to own music tracks. 

Instead, the Spotify application will save more than 3000 tracks (depending on your device's storage capacity) in a DRM-protected caching system.

This will remove the necessity of having a reliable wireless internet connection all the time and could be one of the reasons why Apple's UK mobile network partner, O2, has not threatened to block users like it did with Skype.

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Gustav Söderström, director of portable solutions at Spotify, argued that "This is a hugely significant day in Spotify's short history, As of today our users can access that music wherever they want, providing them with the best of both the online and offline worlds. We've now made it even easier to listen to all the world's music, anywhere on the planet."

The next challenge for Spotify will be to increase the ratio of Spotify users actually paying for the services (rather than using for free). 

Latest figures reveal that only 160,000 people pay for a subscription; that's a mere 2 percent of the eight million or so users Spotify has in Europe.