http://www.courant.com/business/cust...5979251.column
>> Spotify looks like iTunes, works like iTunes and, most important, doesn't need iTunes. Spotify automatically searches your computer for streamable music, whether on iTunes, Windows Media Player or stored in any folder. Once installed, Spotify reduces iTunes to bloatware — unnecessary software.
>> Spotify's Premium subscribers pay $9.99 monthly, or about $120 a year. For that, subscribers access a library whose size rivals the entire iTunes Store. No Beatles, but everything from Lady Gaga to Madagascan guitarist D'Gary, country singer Ashton Shepherd and guitarist Steve Cropper's latest album, a tribute to 1950s R&B group the 5 Royales.
Stream songs or entire albums and listen in the moment, or store them on your iPhone, smartphone or iPad for mobile listening. Up to 3,333 can be downloaded at a time for offline play. Hear what you want, whenever you want.
For that same one-year investment, an iTunes subscriber gets 120 songs, at 99 cents each. The consolation prize: Unlike Spotify, an iTunes subscriber owns those songs forever.
>> Airplay, Apple's wireless technology for streaming music between devices, also works with Spotify. During a trial with the Premium service, I streamed music from an iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad to a kitchen audio system connected to Apple's Airport Express, a $99 wireless base station.
Yes, tap the screen and suddenly the music is playing, virtually indistinguishable from the original source, in front of you.
To find Airplay while a song is playing in Spotify, tap the informational "I" icon in the upper left of the screen, then look down to the volume slidebar for "dock connector." Tap the AirPlay icon, a triangle injected into a rectangle, and select the name associated with your Airport Express or Apple TV.
>> Audio quality. Spotify, which uses the Ogg Vorbis audio format to stream at 160 kilobits per second and up to 320 kbps, is a match for the iTunes Store's 256 kbps AAC downloads.
>> Social media. In Spotify's we-are-the-world moment, users can share a song via Facebook or Twitter and load entire playlists for other Spotify subscribers to view, and listen to, through Facebook. Ping, iTunes' social-networking extension introduced almost a year ago, has been a royal dud.
Prediction: When iCloud debuts this fall, Apple can compete with any cloud service it wants — including Spotify. Apple now classifies iCloud as an online storage locker for users' data and music. But watch how rapibly it expands into movies, perhaps with the Hollywood-approved Ultraviolet format. If Spotify reaches a projected 3 million paying subscribers in its first year in the United States and becomes a powerful alternative to iTunes' donwload-it, buy-it-now approach, Apple can almost instantly turn itself into a streaming-music competitor. Spotify might not dethrone iTunes, but it could change the way we listen to, and store, music.
), the concept is the same like Netflix. 
, for me its not worth it.
