Starting today you’ll be able to purchase Spotify Premium months in over 500 Pressbyrån and 7-Eleven stores in Sweden. You can purchase either one, three, six or twelve months of Spotify Premium directly from the store counter, just like you would top-up a mobile or buy a train ticket.

You’ll receive a receipt that contains a code. Log into the Spotify website and enter that code on the premium purchase page and your account will be immediately upgraded so that you can start enjoying the benefits of a premium subscription.

Having in-store purchases is the first of many new payment options we plan to role out in the near future to make it as convenient as possible for you to subscribe to Spotify.

Note: A 5 SEK service charge will be added to the price.

We previously announced an expanded “Buy From” for users in Spain, France and the UK. Today I wanted to let you know that our download partner 7digital has officially launched their service in Sweden. Along with their launch we’ve expanded our download option to include links for all our Swedish users.

To purchase albums or tracks right click on the track name (control click in Mac OS) and you’ll see the “Buy From” menu item. If the track or album is available for purchase there will be a link to the 7Digital store where you can download the mp3.

The Spotify family is getting bigger and we’re delighted to welcome Faisal Galaria as our new Global Head of Business Development. Faisal brings nearly 15 years of experience from consumer internet, media, regulatory and professional services to the role and we’re excited to have him join the team.

He joins us from the great travel site Kayak where he was Managing Director, International and responsible for launching the site in nine countries. Previously Faisal was General Manager of Jaman and before that Director for Europe at a little start-up called Skype. At Spotify, he will be helping us with international expansion, building partnerships and distribution. “I am passionate about building disruptive companies,” says Faisal. “Spotify is changing the way we all enjoy music and the old paradigms of music ownership. It’s going to be fun.”

Faisal is an ex-athlete (his words, not mine) and enjoys outdoor sports especially scuba diving. Back indoors he’s an avid film fan and particularly enjoys international and festival award winning films. Welcome aboard!

It’s been a little while since I last highlighted some of the community sites built around Spotify. Lots of new ones have appeared and some significant improvements have been made to existing sites so here’s a short list of a few recent sites.

• We Are Hunted have created a dedicated Spotify chart with top tracks and artists. Another neat feature is the constantly changing playlist of the 99 hottest songs in the world right now.
• Share My Playlists have done a major new release incorporating all sorts of cool social features.
• Spotify Mac Remote lets you control Spotify using the remote that came with your Mac.
• FoxyTunes has added Spotify support to their application.
• SpotifiTunes is a tool that allows you to take your iTunes library and create Spotify links for your music collection.

If you’ve created a Spotify related website or tool that we haven’t seen let us know - post your site in the comments and we’ll check it out.

Late last week we put the finishing touches to a very special project we’ve been wanting to share with you for a while now. After many weeks of burning the midnight oil at Spotify HQ in an effort to squeeze into it every drop of musical goodness, we’ve finally completed work on the Spotify app for the iPhone and sent it over to the nice people at Apple.

We thought it might be nice to show you a video of what we’ve built for you.

Our iPhone version is very similar to the Spotify you’re already familiar with and will allow you to listen to your music even when you’re not connected to a network. The application should be available in a few weeks for premium subscribers - we’ll be sure to let you know as soon as it’s in AppStore.

Update: Spotify is now available on the iPhone.

Earlier this week the nominees for the Mercury Prize were announced and we put together a little playlist of the nominated artists that are on Spotify. Who will be this year’s Elbow? Who’s your favorite nominee and was anyone left off that should be there?

One of the challenges all music services face is providing a wide range of music for users with all sorts of different tastes. We’ve worked hard to add classical, punk and indie content from different sources and adding more music is an ongoing process that we continue to work on.

As part of this process we’re really happy today to let you know that we’ve reached an agreement with IODA to bring their extensive catalogue of music to Spotify. IODA is a leader in digital distribution, marketing, and technology solutions for the independent music industry and is a great addition to our growing catalogue. IODA will provide Spotify users with music drawn from a catalogue of nearly two million tracks from over 50 countries and spanning a broad variety of styles including rock, electronic, hip-hop, metal, punk, indie, world, latin, jazz and classical.

Just some of the great artists covered by IODA include: The Prodigy, Burial, Bob Marley & The Wailers, Bashy, Frank Black, Vieux Farka Touré, Broken Social Scene, Easy Star All Stars, Aventura and Stephen Fry. IODA also brings its growing number of international partners into the deal, including Nordic territory partner Bonnier Amigo Music Group, which adds artists such as Ane Brun, Madcon, Hello Saferide, Sunrise Avenue and The Third Degree to the catalogue.

We’ll be adding the tracks over the coming months and are really excited to start working with IODA.

Today’s tip might help if you’ve been listening to a new playlist on random and aren’t sure what the last song was or an ad played and you didn’t open Spotify fast enough to click the banner. We have a history tab in Spotify that allows you to see a listing of everything that you’ve listened to in a current session.

To see the history of your current session head to the Play queue page, then click on the History tab. There you will see all the tracks and ads that have played since you last started Spotify and you can click on any of them to play over again.

We are adding new independent music all the time from various labels, content aggregators and others, but we have to give a special shout to our friends at Merlin. Merlin licensed over six thousand indie labels to us, including many of the world’s leading indies including Beggars, Domino, Kontor New Media, Koch, Wagram, Epitaph, PIAS, Finetunes, K7! and Warp which means we have some amazing independent music in our service that is proving to be hugely popular with Spotify users.

When we launched we wanted to ensure we had the widest possible choice of great independent music as well as the important major label catalogues. Thanks to Merlin (as well as others such as The Orchard, Bonnier Amigo and many more), we now have millions of amazing indie tracks.

When we were a totally unknown service, the guys at Merlin listened and worked with us to license an incredible amount of quality independent music, which is so important to a new music service. Having been live in the UK for a few months now (four to be precise) we have some stats to show that the significant majority of the top-100 indie tracks played on Spotify in UK were from Merlin members. Overall, 10% of all tracks streamed on Spotify in UK were from Merlin which is pretty cool. The entire independent community represents over 20% of music played in Spotify, which shows that users are very broad in their music taste.

All in all, we are grateful for the support and effort that many independent labels and aggregators have given us over the last few months but an extra thank you goes to Merlin, as Spotify was the first service they ever licensed. Nice one, Merlin!

Independent music is an essential part of Spotify. Since day one we’ve been extremely proud to work with a number of great indie artists and labels and we’re really happy to support Independents Day 2009 which is running from July 4th-11th and is a worldwide celebration of great indie music, with a lot of gigs going on across Europe and the rest of the world.

As a way to highlight some of the amazing independent acts out there we’ve hooked up with ShareMyPlaylists.com to come up with a series of indie focused playlists, so check out the ID09 page that they’ve set up for some great tunes.

The focus of celebrations this week will be a series of gigs at London’s prestigious ICA venue between the 6th and 10th July, each night curated by a different renowned independent label, including Bella Union, Fat Cat Records / One Little Indian, Matador/XL and Ninja Tune. A fifth night will be curated by iconic independent music store, Rough Trade East.

Hotly tipped and established acts performing throughout the week will include: Daedelus, The Twilight Sad, We Were Promised Jetpacks, Terry Lynn, St. Vincent, My Latest Novel, Sleeping States, Cymbals Eat Guitars, Joe Gideon & The Shark, Blue Roses, DJ Food, Joe Gideon & The Shark, King Cannibal, Cursor Miner, Here We Go Magic, Chimes and Bells, Kill It Kid and Grasscut.