Spotify won’t be on the iPhone but neither will it ‘revolutise’. Unless…

…it gets cheaper.

I’m a massive Spotify fan. It’s like listening to commercial radio but without self-obsessed DJs tranting about their bowel movements and the same stream of adverts for double glazed windows. Plus, you make up the playlist. Listening to Spotify, unlike any radio station means I can listen to lots of different music, not the same drab playlist 5 times a day.

I can put up with the odd advert in exchange for having a massive collection of music at my fingertips without the need for a cargo container full of hard drives. It’s a damn good deal.

£9.99 to get rid of those adverts isn’t though. Think about it.

When my friend Nick told me he’d subscribed my immediate reaction was, why? For the same amount you could download about 30-40 tracks from eMusic (it’s not like hard drive space is expensive either – most PCs will have plenty of room for a few thousand tracks) and using services like Orb it’s easy to access that music anywhere – including on a mobile phone (like my beloved #JournoPhone).

Which brings me nicely onto the reason Spotify won’t ‘revolutionise’ the industry as many would have us believe. It’s too closed. You can access it on any PC or Mac that has it installed but not on your phone. Those with jail broken iPhones will be able to soon but the rest won’t – and it’ll be a long time before it gets to other phones, if at all.

You can’t easily transport your playlists either. I was at a friend’s house recently and wanted to find some songs off my playlists but the only way to do so was log into my account, open a text file and copy/paste the link to my playlists. Where’s the API? Where’s the web site where I can log in and view, edit, delete and generally screw with my playlists? Where’s the follow feature so I can see when my friends with similar taste create a new playlist or listen to one of mine?

Oh, there’s a C API. Brilliant! That means that all those thousands of C programmers out there can make….. more desktop apps. That’s…… good.

Dear Spotify, give us web dev types an API and we’ll give people more of a reason to actually pay £9.99 a month and then maybe you won’t be missing your revenue targets!

You know, I’m also starting to see a lot more tie-in with Last.fm so maybe I should be directing my requests at CBS? Go on, guys, buy Spotify and add lots of social features to it. If you don’t I’m gonna go write a kick ass business plan and go find some trusting VCs…. then Spotify will be your competitor!

Okay, rant over. Thanks for listening.