Spotify options:
Unlimited$4.99 / month
or
Premium$9.99 / month

I see nothing free about it.

use the standard service. don't get unlimited or premium.

It mentions nothing about a standard service.

Just go to their website and click "Get Spotify". Log on with your Facebook account, download the installer and you're ready. No payment required. Or if you scroll down on their front page, you see three options: Free, Unlimited and Premium.

Only 4 hours of music a month... No thanks.

Where does it even mention that? The only restriction I could see on the free service was that you had to have ads usually after every third or fourth track. This bugged me so I bought a subscription. I never saw anythign about a limit of four hours a month; wouldn't make sense at all.

I dont think it's worth $5 just to get rid of the ads but at the same time $5 isn't so bad. I have spotify and I don't mind the ads but if you really can stand it I think you should get it.

Where does it say so? I used free for a while, and I could use as much as 10 hours a week.

I saw that doing a search. Seem not to be able to find that now.

When was that? They have changed their page quite recently.
Btw, here's their FAQ page (for the US). You can use Spotify Free as much as you want there. Other countries have different limits, though (7th question on the UK page).

I love it. I am very happy to pay $10 a month to listen to almost anything I can think of. These days, I even tend to just stream albums I already own from iTunes, CD, amazon MP3, etc. (I figure every stream pays a tiny bit of $$ for the artist, whereas they already got paid when I bought their record on iTunes three years ago.)

Tracks sound great for me, and I like being able to download playlists to my iPhone for using at the gym, for example.

And I enjoy the social aspect of it posting on my FB, as there's a few folks I chat with there about what we're hearing. And I found Soundrop yesterday, which reminds me a little of turntable.fm, and I think that's going to be a cool feature.

What it comes down to is that I could never afford to buy all the music I am listening to now. But in exchange, I am listening to way more music than I would have done before without relying on youtube or other ways of sampling stuff.

I would probably be okay with the ads if I only ever listened on my desktop. But I use my iPhone all the time to play music - even when I am at home. So I need the $10 account.

And it's worth it to me to pay a few bucks since my listening has shifted to about 95% streaming in the last few months, and it will only increase.

Since this has been bumped, does anyone know how to resize the search bar? Mine has shrunk to tiny proportions (ooo-eeer!) and I really have to squint or else push my nose right up to the monitor to make sure what I'm typing is what I think it is. It just changed one day and I haven't been able to change it back. Real pain.

I use it to test the music I want to buy.

I've only had spotify on my computer (the free version) and if I had the money, I would most definitely pay the $10 for the premium to have my music anywhere. It's better than iTunes because you don't have to pay per album or per song, just monthly.

Spotify's newest update was so damn terrible that I had to find a way to downgrade my version. They removed SO many important functions. Using that crap for a day and then reverting back felt just amazing. Hoping they actually read all the complaints and fix it as soon as possible.

I have Premium and I love it.

How do you downgrade?

Yeah, the update is garbage.

How the hell do people stream spotify so much on the go? Do they really have that much mobile internet? Isn't that expensive as ****?

I wanted to try reverting back to a version of Spotify that still had the ability to integrate local files directly into the streaming library, but I downloaded 0.8.5 and it automatically installed 0.9.15. Which is still better than the new update, but... all the updates have been getting progressively crappier for the last couple of years.

What's in the new update? Haven't done it yet.

When I updated it it started playing a lot less ads for me and nothing else changed whatsoever besides the appearance. I'm pretty angry about it

Spotify has an incredibly limited music library. Licensing rights and hosting expenses make commercial streaming services a failure from the start if you're looking for anything outside of the general sphere of popular song.

Every year or so I connect to Spotify and feed it a number of the artists from my personal music library - artists with 50-300 albums to their name. Each time Spotify has returned only a handful of results.

And given the widely-reported user discontent with the service's crippling of their interface, it is unlikely that they will ever win me as a customer.

I generally ignore updates. If it ain't broke....
I don't think streaming costs money, unless as you say you're on mobile internet, but I do all my Spotifying from home and I have unlimited download with my ISP so no problem.
My taste isn't exactly what you'd call eclectic, but I have seldom come across an album I couldn't get there. The odd one, yes, but very seldom. And then of course there's Grooveshark and if you're really stuck YouTube. It's great for those of us who just want to listen to an album to review it, without having to buy the thing, even if it can be got for less than a dollar...

Does anybody know how to stop Spotify from automatically updating. Every time I downgrade and then close my Spotify, it installs the new update and I have to go downgrade it again. It's fecking annoying. Their new update is a load of balls. The music stutters for me, but the old version doesn't.

Stopping Spotify Updates
 

Not a Spotify user myself, but a quick search produced this solution to stop their updates. Old versions are available for download if you look around.

According to a community discussion on Spotify's user forum -

Go to C:/Users/<Name>/Appdata/Roaming/Spotify

1. Make a new empy text file
2. Name it Spotify_new.exe
3. Right click the file and make the file read only

1. Make a new empty text file
2. Name it Spotify_new.exe.sig
3. Right click the file and make the file read only

Spotify will not be able to update because it can't delete the files, because they are read only, all future upgrades will fail.

Let me know if this works for you.

Dredging this thread up out of the archives to ask: once I've added my own (local) music to Spotify, how can I access it as in search? I can see all the tracks in a list (is it possible to rearrange them by album/artiste etc?) but if I search I just get what Spotify has on its own servers. Some of my albums have specific formats I want to listen to (collectors' editions etc) so how do I access them?

Thanks
TH

They used to have a dedicated search bar for your local music, but they removed it for some weird reason.