>These days it is starting to become more likely for obscure, independently-distributed music to be there than not to be there. YMMV. I use Spotify a fair bit,

>These days it is starting to become more likely for obscure, independently-distributed music to be there than not to be there. YMMV. I use Spotify a fair bit, despite having a fairly crappy UI (not that it's too bad, just annoying in places), but there's no way in hell I'd pay for it unless at least one of the following things were true: 1) The premium version cost just £5 a month - The £10 it actually costs would cover a new album each month, which is a permanent asset worth more to me than being able to listen to their selection for a limited period. There is a £5 a month subscription, but it doesn't have mobile or offline mode, so it's near useless. Ironically, I might not feel that way if the premium option simply didn't exist, but putting them side-by-side looks like naked profiteering. 2) I could search for something and expect at least an 85% chance of finding it. The current 50%-ish is nowhere near good enough to pay that much for. I listen to a fair bit of European techno/rock/metal/industrial and those seem to be particularly weak areas. If you can have a conversation with a random person in a pub about a band, there's a good chance they have it I guess, but even then there are a lot of surprising gaps. For a random example, my last search was for something (anything) by Arcade Fire, but no joy. As you say, it is technically very well designed - very responsive, and even without offline mode it buffers well enough that the frequent dropouts in my crappy ADSL connection haven't caused any problems I can recall. I just feel that it's overpriced for such a limited selection.