Spotify lands on iPhone throughout Europe

As was mentioned last week, Spotify, the all-you-can-eat subscription music service, was approved for the App Store. It looks to have just gone live in Europe where you can now have access to over 6 million songs on your iPhone for roughly $20 a month.

The App also will cache your playlists for times when you might be offline or out of mobile coverage (like a plane ride or a trip to New York City).

You can download it here free for Apple’s App Store here (and the Android Market).

The package is not a bad deal and many people have raved about the desktop service but there's one monster catch. Like all third party iPhone apps, it doesn't work in the background. That is a huge crutch for a music player on a smartphone. Want to browse the web? Check Email? Write an SMS? No more music.

The App is only in Europe (UK, Sweden, France and Spain) for the moment. The service is hitting North America in the coming months.

Also, it will be interesting to see if Apple revisits the iTunes all-you-can-download service that was rumored by the Financial Times last year. I'm not sure exactly what happened to that one -likely Apple and the labels couldn't come up with an agreement - but Apple could certainly kill Spotify in its tracks by announcing such a service built into its iconic iPod player and iPod app.

Coincidentally, Spotify, which is now valued at €170 million, counts the music labels as its investors (18% ownership).

Wednesday is Apple's yearly iPod event where they are expected to release a number of new toys including camera equipped iPods, a "Cocktail" digital music Album packaging technology and hopefully, a "One more thing".

I'll be liveblogging the event. Set your browser here at 1PM Eastern Time on Wednesday.