You raise a good point about the distinction between a music discovery service and a way to avoid having to curate your own music collection. My personal use of

You raise a good point about the distinction between a music discovery service and a way to avoid having to curate your own music collection. My personal use of music streaming services (we7 in my case) is built around the latter. If I have a party at my house, it's pretty useful to plug the laptop into the stereo and let people choose music from we7 rather than me having to specifically go out and buy any song that gets played. It sounds like Spotify are probably shooting themselves in the foot by destroying a good part of their value for a lot of their customers.