Paying Spotify users gain Linux capacity

Spotify announced on Monday that its music streaming application has come to Linux.

But, according to the blog post that announced the move, because Spotify "haven't found a reliable way to display ads," the Linux version is available only to Spotify Premium subscribers, who pay £9.99 a month for access to the application.

Also, according to the blog, "issues" mean that local music functionality (when tracks are stored on the device, rather than streamed) is unavailable. Local music functionality is currently only available to Spotify Premium subscribers.

The company said in its post that Spotify users have been asking for full fledged Linux support for some time, and it linked to a long-running customer support thread to demonstrate this.

Users have complained in the past about new updates to Spotify causing instability in Wine, a compatibility layer software application that they have been using as a stopgap solution for gaining Spotify functionality on Linux systems.

Spotify called the Linux distribution a "preview release" and noted that the version is still unsupported.

Versions of Spotify are already available for Windows, iOS, Symbian and Google Android. The latest figures available put its userbase at seven million, with 250,000 people currently subscribing to the premium version.

Spotify had not returned requests for updated usage figures at the time of publication.

Update: Spotify, as of March 2010, had around 7 million total users across Europe, with 3 million in the UK and, globally, 320,000 paying subscribers, according to Jim Butcher, Spotify's head of communications.