Spotify is the new “big” thing in the music world; streaming music from a giant online database of millions of songs, creating playlists etc – all without actually buying the music. It was just released for the iPhone, and I tried it out.

Spotify is a legal system where you pay in some way – either directly for an ad free/ + mobile experience or by having ads as pictures and audio in the program – to get to browse a database of millions of songs and listen to them as you like. The difference compared to what you’re sued to is that you don’t own any of the music, you simply stream it directly from the Internet as you please. The quality is good, using some decent bitrate Ogg Vorbis formats for streaming, and the selection is huge.

The iPhone client now available will let you use your premium account (99NOK/$15 per month) to get the Spotify experience on your iPhone. The app is also available for Android and will be released for other mobile OSes like the S60 in the future. Spotify mobile does however not work with the free, ad-supported version of the service.

When you first install Spotify it will ask you to login and then sync the playlists you have on your PC client. You can then use these, search for more music, make playlists etc as you please. The music will stream directly from the Internet just as it does on the PC version.

There is however a very important extra on the mobile client: offline mode. Basically this allows you to (when connected to WiFi) download the songs and play them when you don’t have a (sufficient) network connection to stream directly. This makes the app a lot more powerful and extends it’s usefulness on the go to people with iPod touches or simply people who don’t have unlimited data plans on their cellphones (or don’t have 3G/Edge coverage).

The app works well; it’s quick, easy to use and generally works as advertised. There are however some downsides. First off, all you can really do is search for music – it won’t recommend anything and there isn’t a “radio” (random streaming tracks) like on the PC client. This means you either have to know exactly what you want, or make playlists on the desktop where you have at least a few more options (albeit not many).

There are also other minor annoyances like the app having crashed a few times and small interface annoyances like not being able to edit playlists from the “add to playlist” menu. The latter annoyance basically means if you want to create a new playlist to add an album/song/etc to, you have to go back to the playlist menu and do it from there as you can’t do it when you select to add to playlist. As a comparison, it would be like not being able to create folders from the “save as…” popup box on a PC forcing you to go to the destination folder manually and do it from there.

The iPhone also won’t let third party apps run in the background, so if you’re using Spotify you have to have Spotify open at all times unolike the built in music player which will play in the background. This is an annoyance from Apple’s side and the most annoying thing about this app altogether- I do other thigns while listening all the time; check mail, google reader etc etc. I can’t have my media in an app that clsoes every time I go to do that.

All in all, Spotify is great value if you listen to music a lot (which I really don’t do), as long as you can live without multitasking and tolerate a few crashes here and there. 99NOK/$15 a month isn’t that much for unlimited access to millions of songs, and it’s definitely the cheaper route to go if you want a lot of music and want to be legal.