Spotify, the online music service, has announced that it will be extending its services for users which would see it taking iTunes on directly for a market share in the online music industry.

From this week Spotify has expanded to include an iPhone and iPod app that s now available to non paying members of the service while Spotify is also trying to urge their users to import their music collections to them rather than to the Apple alternative.

The main crux of the change is the offering of Spotify as the primary music management platform for users which had, until this week, only been available to users who paid for this service.

Spotify are now looking to convert the non paying customers which represent 90% of their total 10 million users, to this new free system.

The company are now able to offer the service for free as it will be bankrolled by advertising revenue.

A spokesman for Spotify said: “We think it is a better experience. If it is not, then people will go back to iTunes. Users are juggling two products at the same time and they said they really wanted to synch their playlists with their iPods and iPhones.”

Although Spotify are excited about the changes, industry experts have been less than impressed with the offerings with some citing the track bundle offers as not being all that attractive to users or even such a great deal on music while the dominance of Apple and iTunes looks like being a nut too large to crack by Spotify.

Mark Mulligan of Forrester Research told the BBC: “I can see what Spotify is trying to do, it wants to acquire the clothes of a more robust music service by offering ways of buying as well as listening to music and creating an alternative music management platform.

“iTunes is a very bloated music management service but people use it because it is tied to their devices. Apple offers access to the cloud, it has a billing relationship with users. People ill still have to go back to iTunes to buy new tracks. It is hard to see significant numbers of people using it.”