Apple has just given Spotify the green light for its player application to be available for download at the App Store. Very shortly your iPhone will be able to act like a gigantic iPod. You will have ready access there to a vast library of recorded music. You won't own the music (did you ever?) in the way you owned a CD or a download. But you will have full access to Spotify's music servers. What is more astonishing is that Spotify playlists will be able to be synced to an iPhone or iPod Touch and played offline. You may not be playing actual downloaded music but it sure will feel like it.

Spotify is free to use currently with some fairly unobtrusive advertising endured. Alternatively for £10 per month the ads are gone. Either way it is a high quality user experience. Just about any recorded work can be accessed on demand within a couple of seconds. Some are surprised that Apple sanctioned this iPhone application as it may well be sounding the death knell for its own iTunes and the iPod. iTunes with its buy-per-track method requires an actual sound-file be downloaded. You climb the pay-wall, then do the download. It's not cumbersome. Apple has it streamlined to be quick and easy. Yet with Spotify - bang! There it is. The music is coming at you in few seconds with no negotiating to be done. Since I started using it a few months ago it has never been off my computer desktop.

Streaming is not universally liked. Many prefer to have some kind of tangible hard copy in their possession. It then feels more like ownership. Some don't even like downloads for that reason. They prefer to have the CD or the vinyl or whatever actually there on the shelf, something they can see, touch, feel and smell as well as listen to, something that engages all the senses. I get that. Way back when it was being predicted that computer files would come to dominate how music was consumed I really did not imagine that. I thought that there was too much historical attachment to that full sensory experience of a physical music album. I included myself as one unlikely to be converted. From the browsing of racks of records in a store, to the reading of liner notes, to the rolling of joints on LP covers, there was just too much emotion tied up in the physical for all that to be swept away in favour of an unsexy mp3 file. I was turned around with indecent haste. When I saw what downloading offered I was off on a new journey. What was so seductive about it was accessibility. I could find everything and anything quickly. At the mere mention of an artist I could go find that music, sample it and have it right there in my collection. iTunes overnight became my de facto music player. My CD collection receded into the background and has remained there. I rarely buy one now.

As if in sync with my consumer choice record shops began to disappear from the high street and the music business went into implosion. As these stores had become pretty uncool places to go into and the record biz had done me no favours as a musician myself then did I care? Not a bit. I now listen to more music than I ever have both as a consumer and as a professional. I listen to a wider variety of artists from the obscure to the high profile. I get as much and more from that experience as I ever did. That I can throw thousands of tracks on to a tiny player the size of a fag packet and go off in the car with it seems miraculous. It is a true wonder of the modern age for anyone into music.

So I am a total convert to this development in every way. If I can now substitute the downloaded iPod tracks for their streamed equivalents alongside everything else that is catalogued on servers then better still. The listening experience is exactly the same. It is access that has been so much further enhanced. Once the music is in the air it doesn't much matter much what the carrier is unless you are a picky audiophile who likes to fuss about sound quality. I fuss about sound enough in my work as a producer. I'm only too happy to let all that go when it comes to leisure. Then it's all about the emotion. The technical niceties are immaterial.

If you've not tried Spotify already I highly recommend it (it will be available in the US soon). If the iPhone app due in a few days is as user-friendly as the desktop version then I will feel justified in proclaiming that the future has truly arrived.