Over the course of a year that does seem like a lot of money – particularly as most users will already have huge music collections of their own – but the promise of millions of tracks available on the move is certainly tempting.

Starting up

Once logged in, you’ll be delighted to see all of your desktop playlists seamlessly synced with Spotify on your phone, and if that’s what you’re after you can just dive straight in.

Over Wi-Fi, tracks play immediately; on 3G we had pauses of anything up to ten seconds, and EDGE is even longer. But once the track is going we were only scuppered by the occasional drop-out for a few seconds – and our office is a notorious O2 blackspot.

When tracks are playing the screen looks similar to that of standard iPhone playback, with the usual controls, a CD cover if Spotify can find it, and an extra options button in the top-right corner.

Tap this for details of the album and artist, an option to add it to an existing playlist, and extra shuffle and repeat controls.

Offline playlists

Altering playlists on your desktop client brings a seamless update on the iPhone app too, in mere seconds if you’re on Wi-Fi. And you have the incredible option of turning them all into “Offline playlists”: next time you connect to Wi-Fi the entire playlist will download onto the phone for use at any time.

The limit is a rather odd 3,333 tracks, and all you have to do is connect once every 30 days to prove you’re still a Premium subscriber. That’s a pretty phenomenal amount of music at your fingertips, and conveniently sidesteps those obvious issues while on the tube or out in the wilderness.

Searching is simple enough, with three tabs to arrange results by Tracks, Albums and Artists. It’s not something you’ll want to do regularly with the iPhone keyboard – you’ll create a playlist in a fraction of the time using the desktop client – but it works well for finding that track you just heard in the pub.

That’s the real meat of the app, and the only other addition is a More… button on the homepage, with details of the app, a link to Spotify.com’s help page, and an option for forcing offline mode even in network areas. And that’s your lot. It all works remarkably smoothly and won’t be at all unfamiliar to users of the desktop app.

The caveats

There are a few key issues though. The first is Wi-Fi, which works fine in most cases but currently refuses to work over firewalled networks. So, no office Spotify just yet, and it also casts doubt over the app’s usefulness on public Wi-Fi networks. Spotify representatives have suggested opening port 4070, but in Starbucks that won’t be an option. Rest assured it’s high on the list of fixes being worked on.

Then there’s the iPhone’s annoying single-task way of working. The functionally identical Android app can play tracks in the background while you work, but on the iPhone you have to have Spotify open at all times. Nip out for a second to check your emails and playback will stop dead, although it will continue from that point when you next load it back up.

And finally there’s the issue of battery life. The iPhone’s music player isn’t exactly kind to the battery anyway, but when you’re adding data transfer on top of that too, it becomes greedy to the extreme. A mere half-hour of streaming over 3G has taken a good 25% of my battery bar (on a last-generation iPhone 3G), so I wouldn’t be too confident of using it for the duration of a long train journey. There’s not a great deal Spotify can do about it – although the offline playlist option should reduce the effect by quite a bit.

These are certainly drawbacks, and they must be considered when the cost is a significant £10 a month. But all in all it’s a hugely impressive debut. A few features of the desktop client haven’t made it across – the radio channels and top lists, for example – but as a standalone player for specifically selected tracks and playlists it’s a very tempting proposition.

A far greater issue has arisen, though. On a short 20-minute walk from Charing Cross to Soho, my 3G connection dropped out no fewer than six times, each time for around 15 seconds. One of those six times the Spotify app was even kind enough to close itself automatically. It’s annoying enough to put me off, so I guess the offline mode is going to be the major way I’ll be using Spotify from now on.

On the one hand, Chinese Democracy, Axl Rose’s 15-year tortuous journey towards the Guns N’ Roses album he always felt he had in his brilliantly destructive brain, was released. On the other hand, a music software company came to our offices and showed us some software that analyses all the music on your hard drive, clusters it into a big cloud of tempos, styles, and other gubbins, then lets you choose your playlists visually by picking the clusters that interest you.

The two couldn’t have been further apart in what they represent. Think back to the albums that have defined a point in time, or a generation. Appetite For Destruction, Nevermind and Definitely Maybe jump to mind from my generation; yours will undoubtedly feature others, those bigger-than-music albums that everyone in school bought and listened to on loop till they knew every note and nuance.

Chinese Democracy is part of a dying breed. An album that is absolutely intended to be listened to as a whole, a selection of 14 songs painstakingly constructed and assembled into a single album, with track order, transitions, lyrical theme and album design all chosen for a reason. And – despite what reviewers pining for a 20-year-old sound may tell you – it’s fascinating. A huge array of styles and tempos, with heavy rock giving way to piano ballads, and with most tracks throwing in more styles in five minutes than Coldplay will manage in a career.

As Axl has surely already discovered, though, MP3 players and their personal playlists have no respect for any of this. A quick look at the Chinese Democracy iTunes page shows that you can download the tracks individually, and that the ratio of those downloading the title track (and first single) to those downloading the other album tracks is depressingly huge.

Do you think Katy Perry spent 15 years recording an opera of musical masterpieces to best complement I Kissed A Girl before she aired it in public?

No, she didn’t because she didn’t have to. Thousands of people can happily download her one popular song without having to acknowledge the existence of the other twelve tracks, and still make money for her record label. She could almost not have bothered with the album at all, but as it probably only took a week to write and record, the label can’t lose by putting it out.

The emphasis on individual tracks rather than albums is bad enough for the industry, but playlists are making it worse. If Katy Perry on repeat hasn’t driven you to lop your own ears off with a rusty kitchen knife, your MP3 player will recommend similar tracks, also randomly plucked from their own album line-ups. It can watch which tracks you listen to and which tracks you skip, further driving you towards the big singles, particularly as many obscure album tracks aren’t instantly recognisable – or indeed catchy – when heard in isolation.

Then there’s the playlist based on genre or tempo. The logic is terrible – I like Frank Sinatra so I must also like some Butlins crooner off X Factor strangling a cover version; I like the plodding pace of a Radiohead wrist-slitter so I must also like Leonard Cohen.

You may think that by finding more songs like your favourites you’re broadening your musical tastes, but you’re doing the opposite. You’re becoming someone who likes to listen to what iTunes thinks is “Alternative Rock” but not “Alternative Pop/Rock”; someone who likes Apple’s “Punk Revival” but not “Punk Rock”. Here’s another band that’s probably not as good as the one whose album you haven’t finished listening to yet, enjoy!

Don’t get me wrong, genuinely useful features like Apple’s Genius Playlists can throw up some great bands to try from outside your own collection; but it’s the opting for personal playlists over the intended form, the focus on the track rather than the album, which means we’ll likely never see another record with the social impact of old.

I realise this is merely my Luddite opinion – I know several PC Pro colleagues listen to their music in precisely this modern way and disagree with me entirely – but if they just chose an album and listened to it from start to finish once in a while I’m sure they’d be surprised by how many bands do more than just hit singles.