I did their free trial and it was the first time I thought for a brief moment "hey, this subscription thing, it's not too terrible." There is a lot of music to either discover or that I had in the recesses of my brain, entire albums I used to own on cassette (don't hate, I'm old) that I never bought on CD.
It started out as a fairly fun month going back and re-listening to music I bought in the 80s but don't have the equipment to play it. I listened to other stuff that CMJ and Paste magazine or (shudder) the pompous hypocritical windbags at Pitchfork rave about (then turn around and slam and label as sellouts if, heaven forbid someone sells a few thousand albums). It was an interesting week or two but by the second week I had run out of music I wanted to casually listen to. Furthermore they don't have a lot of songs I wanted to hear or had weird covers or worse, karaoke versions of tracks, it's pretty bizarre. I already own (legally mind you) over 30,000 songs in iTunes with a mix of them being ripped from my CDs and maybe 30% are online purchases (Apple, Amazon, etc). So by the last week of the subscription I was hard pressed to find a reason to pay $9.99 for something when I'd rather own the music.
It may be great for some people, I have friends who don't own a lot of music and/or financially at $10 a month it's more worth it for them. But for many the reality is it's better to just own the music and not pay to rent it. There's a reason so many of the past rental-type music stores have gone the way of the dodo, as a business model it doesn't really jazz most people.
I will say this though about Spotify, I do like it better than Pandora (free version). Pandora does let your create channels and stuff and I think or thought Spotify is going to bring something similar. At the moment though I'd like more control over what I'm hearing and Pandora's algorithm keeps playing songs and artists I thumbs down repeatedly, which is annoying.
This said I do wish the best for Spotify as it's an option for some, and options are good, and they've put a lot of effort into it, and from time to time I want to hear a (one) song that I don't want to buy, hence going to the computer and launching the free Spotify app and listening to that one song is satisfying enough.
