i coughed up $10 to try out the premium service. it's pretty damn sweet.
i heard a great song the other night. normally, i'd get on my music site and download all that band's albums in flac, tag them, get album art, throw it all into foobar, transcode the flac to mp3, and throw it on my ipod to check it out while at work. even if i didn't end up liking the albums very much, i probably wouldn't delete them out of my music library after all that hard work...
instead, i opened Spotify on my PC and on my ipod. my PC immediately started talking to my ipod wirelessly. i selected the band's 3 albums, threw them into a playlist, and "synced" it to my ipod (what actually happened is my PC told my ipod to cache the audio data for those albums). i listened to them at work, and decided i'm not too impressed. so i just added the one song i liked to my Spotify favorites, and deleted the playlist with the rest
the selection is good, the speed is good, and it's easy to use. it's great for listening to music i only care to enjoy once in a great while, or for checking out new music before downloading them from What.
i'll see how much i use it this month, but i think i'll end up keeping my subscription...