It could have all been so great. A new internet service that allowed you to pick and choose which songs you want to listen to and discover new ones, all at your own leisure, from your own laptop. Spotify has taken off, quickly becoming an internet darling.

But Spotify, it appears, isn’t interested in Ireland. Sure, it’s in beta. And we get that the free service isn’t available (as hundreds of users found when they got an email from Spotify alerting them to the fact).

But you can’t sign up for the premium service here either. Click through to the homepage and you get “Why is Spotify not available in my country?”.

It doesn’t seem to have always been that way. After being cut off from the free service, some Spotify fans in ireland went premium. And I’ve had a few puzzled messages from people asking me why they could no longer sign up for premium access.

We should probably be used to it at this stage. Companies that launch services in the UK take months to get around to making them available in Ireland. While they talk about differing licensing agreements, Irish consumers are, at times, left feeling like second class citizens.

However, in the case of Spotify, they haven’t even told us that much. To date, I’ve sent four emails to Spotify’s press contact asking why the premium service is not available in Ireland. All four have been ignored.

Spotify doesn’t have a phone contact on their website. A little googling unearthed a number, but it didn’t work. So I had no choice but to keep trying their press email address on their website.

The first email was casual. The second explained no one had been in contact and could someone please respond as I had a deadline. After all, emails can get lost, missed or simply forgotten about. Ditto for the third and fourth. There hasn’t even been an acknowledgment that the emails were even received.

For any company, this is pretty poor. For a new media company, doing business on the internet, it’s shabby.

The ironic thing is that on Spotify’s own page explaining the restrictions generally, the phrase “All good things come to those who wait!” appears.

It seems there are plenty of people out there who would like to pay Spotify for the premium service. Perhaps the company might like to answer why they can’t when up to a few weeks ago, they could?