BREAKING: Well, look out iTunes. We’ve said previously that Spotify didn’t look like it was going to compete with the Apple iTunes Store. It’s streaming, freemium music service after all, not a download store.

It also recently launched an iPhone app that only subscribers can use.

But perhaps the hint of their strategy lay in the fact that on that app you could save playlists and tracks for offline playing (if, say, you were on a plane), though you can not access any kind of MP3 file for sharing of course.

All that changes today because later today Spotify will extend the ‘Offline mode’ that is available on Spotify Mobile and bringing it to the desktop version of Spotify. Users will be limited to how much music they can download to offline mode – but this is surely a very interesting move which has implications for how people consume music.