Keen to ditch the downloads and access Spotify’s streaming catalogue via your phone or iPod Touch? Then you’re going to have to wait. Although Spotify has recruited programmers to work on iPhone and s60 apps, an official release is still some time away. (Sadly, the iPhone Spotify app demo on YouTube is a fan-generated mock up. See also this design consultant’s vision.)

However, there is a way of listening to your favourite Spotify tracks on your iPhone or s60 smartphone (most Nokias, lots of Samsungs, and a few LGs) without downloading. It involves ’scrobbling’ your Spotify tracks to Last.fm, which is pretty simple if you’re already a Last.fm user, but if you have no idea what scrobbling means then read on…

The first thing you need to do, if you haven’t done so already, is to sign up to Last.fm. With all the recent hype surrounding Spotify, it’s easy to forget just how good Last.fm is. It’s essentially a personal radio station that builds playlists based on your listening habits. It does this by ’scrobbling’, or identifying and tracking, each piece of music you listen to. Signing up is easy – just enter a user name, email address and password, and you’re away. And, of course, it’s free.

If you’d like Last.fm to scrobble the music you listen to on your computer or iPod you can download the Last.fm Scrobbler. The more tracks you scrobble, the better recommendations you’re going to get. (I’m currently at 20,284…)

To scrobble your Spotify listening habits, open Spotify, go to Edit and Preferences, tick ‘Enable scrobbling to Last.fm’ and enter your Last.fm username and password.

Next, you need to install Last.fm to your phone. If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch you can download the official app, for free, from the App Store. Nokia and other s60 users need to download the MobblerLast.fm radio player. You can also get Last.fm apps for Google Android phones and the 3 INQ1.

The apps differ slightly by phone, but essentially you’ll now have a choice of personalised playlists, including a personal library made up of your scrobbled tracks, and a recommended playlist based on your scrobbled tracks. You can skip, ban, and ‘love’ tracks, and the app will continue to scrobble as you do so. If you’re new to Last.fm it’s going to take a few weeks to build up enough scrobbles to take full advantage of the service. So fire up Spotify and get listening…

(Bear in mind that streaming music obviously uses a lot of data, so it’s recommended you only use these apps on an unlimited data contract or your Wi-Fi connection.)

[UPDATE: The Spotify iPhone app is go!]

Paul Music, Technology