Dear Spotify: I love you, but...
Spotify Premium is one of my favorite subscription music services, it's like having every song in the iTunes Music Store in your library. And instead of song previews, you can stream any song. All of it. Spotify Premium ($10/month) has over 15 million tracks, an offline mode, no ads and 320 kbps streams.
So what's not to like?
Although Spotify Premium advertises "mobile support" (which includes the iPhone and iPod touch) it doesn't support the iPad. That's right, the single best thing to happen to music since iTunes doesn't support the best selling tablet computer on the market. Amazing.
Spotify's UK MD Chris Maples told Pocket-lint in December 2011 that the launch of an iPad app was "a priority" and was "absolutely in the pipeline." But here we are, three and half months later and nothing.
Sure, pixel-doubled iPhone apps might look better on the iPad 3's Retina display -- but not $10 per month better. As much as it would pain me to do, I'm giving Spotify one more ding of my credit card to release a universal/native iPad app before I cancel my subscription and move to another service.
Apple should have acquired Spotify (instead of LaLa?) to augment its anemic $25/year iTunes Match service which only downloads songs to iOS devices despite claiming that it streams them.
(Aside: I put the Live Phish app in the same boat. Swim up to the big screen boys or I'm cutting bait.)
What's your music subscription app of choice?
Update: Spotify's Head of Communications replied to my email about the lack of an iPad app with this:
An iPad app is in the works - no date on release yet, but we're very excited by what we're seeing.