Thinking of signing up to Spotify premium - can you add the songs you download to iTunes or is this something Apple block you from doing?

Or rip to a cd at least?

Unless you mean buy songs through spotify (in which case you probably wouldn't bother with premium) then no. The downloaded playlists aren't stored as tracks that you can get hold of.

You can use a variety of audio rippers if you desire (audacity for example) but its a fairly slow process, fiddly and the quality at the end will be something like 128kbps. I use it occasionaly to make mix cds for the car but otherwise you're better just buying the tracks (or straight up piracy).

I'd recommend Spotify Premium. Their online catalogue is a lot better than it used to be and you get no adverts. The 'Available Offline' facility is great for when you're not connected to Wi-Fi. You can download/sync any playlist to your phone/laptop and listen on the go. I barely use iTunes anymore.

The one aspect I'd like to see improved is their royalties scheme. It's been widely publicized that Spotify pay very little to the artists who upload their music to the database. I'd like to see that increased in the not so distant future.

i would add to this - when you write any songs to offline content make sure you do it over wifi, as they involve a lot of data transfer and you could fall foul of your mobile useage limits. otherwise as the above poster has said, its all good