With all of the high profile absences from the iPhone and iPod Touch’s App Store starting to build up, you can imagine Apple might end up doing things it’s not entirely comfortable with, not least of which, approving Spotify for sale on the App Store.

For those of you who aren’t into Spotify, it’s a pretty compelling music streaming service that allows users to search a truly vast library, build playlists and then forward them to other Spotify users. The reason the App Store was expected to take issue with it is mostly because people have expressed the view that Spotify could well be the death of iTunes’ music sales. Why buy the music cow if you’re getting the music for free (with minimal advertising)?

In actuality though, we’d be quite surprised if Spotify had a negative impact on iTunes sales. If nothing else, a Spotify app would only give iPhone/iPod Touch users an opportunity to legally have a listen to an album (interspersed with the occasional ads) and decide whether or not they’d like to buy it based on that. Let’s face it, any advertising is a damn sight worse than no advertising.

If you don’t have a Spotify account, you may well have missed the boat until there’s an offering made to Ireland officially, unless you’re lucky enough to know people who can invite you. There were dubious ways of grabbing Spotify accounts through UK proxies, but for the most part they’ve been shored up.

That said, some users on our Twitter feed have been saying they’ve managed to pick up accounts this week… not that we condone that kind of behaviour or anything.

Update: The charming @tenacioustim has informed us that Spotify is available from Eire.App. You’ll need the for-pay version of Spotify to run the app, which means no ads and the ability to store tunes for listening offline. In that case, there could very well be some trouble for iTunes, but it’s hard to redact an app that’s already been approved. It looks as though mobile music just got a bit more interesting.