Spotify certainly rule the headlines as far as streaming start-ups go. 2008-9 has seen a massive increase in presence, users and hype. Today brings the announcement that their iPhone app has now been approved. There was a lot of ‘will they, won’t they’ hype about this because Apple have recently taken a lot of heat for denying applications for all sorts of silly reasons. But it’s finally here, so well done Spotify, now user, time to plug in your iPhone/3G/3GS/iPod Touch and synch away by finding it on the Apple store here.

However user, has the smile already left your face upon realisation that it’s only available to Premium users? Well that’s old news really, but why aren’t you already signed up? Personally, I’m not using Spotify as much as I used to, because I moved into a new place in Birmingham City Centre, took out the best broadband package Virgin could offer… but we still can’t use Spotify unless everyone is asleep and more bandwidth is available to us. So it would have taken something special for me to take become a Premium user, with my work, I get a lot of music and new music anyway, but the idea of an iPhone app had me sold, yes, I was going to go Premium. Never again shall Jonathon from Spotify ruin my playlist.

Time then user, time to sign up. Well who wouldn’t with the great deals they have on offer. You can get a month at a reasonable £9.99 or… 12 months at a whopping… oh erm… £119.88… Yes user, no longer will have to endure those tedious moments of deciding what to do with all that interest the money has accumulated in your account over the year, Spotify will take those troubles off your mind (I think it was Jonathons idea) by making sure you don’t have any and offering you a yearly saving interest of £0.00.

Okay user, you’ve thought about it for a nanosecond and decided to go with the monthly option, excellent choice. Time to enter those payment details… What do you mean you don’t have a credit card? This is the credit crunch isn’t it, I thought everyone had one? It blows my mind when a company, who has customers who want to give them money won’t give them various and convenient ways to do so, Apples Mobile Me is the same. So there are many people in the UK including everyone under the age of 18 who can’t subscribe even if they wanted to.

This coming at a time when the adverts have increased to a large extent, which hasn’t gone unnoticed by it’s users…

So hey Spotify, how about this…

• Why not give your customers incentives to become premium members for longer?
• Why not let them pay in a way that’s convenient for them?
• Why not let all users trial your mobile app for a week for free? That’s it, hook them in, if they can’t try it out, they won’t know what they’re missing out on, you know this will increase subscriptions (and I do know it would also cost a fair bit for the streaming etc. but in business, this is called a loss leader).

Regular readers will know I’m a fan of the Spotify camp, so I hope this feedback will help them improve their service in some way. However, the announcement of the app approval is only ever a good thing.