A few days ago I thought I'd try out Spotify Premium. I was sick of adverts on Spotify, and was getting a little bored of my own local music collection. £10 for unlimited music for a month is absolutely fantastic value — especially if you want to simply try out a few new bands but don't want to buy their albums.
My other motivation for going Premium was the mobile app. Although you can stream music over a cellular data connection (and where you have a good 3G or HSDPA connection this works flawlessly) I mainly wanted the offline functionality. That is making it so playlists can be downloaded so a constant (good) data connection isn't needed to listen to music.
To the right is the Spotify Android application running on my HTC Wildfire. It has much less functionality than the desktop version and doesn't give you quite the same polished experience, however it is still a powerful media player. One major issue I have with it is that local tracks are indexed and heaped into "Local Files". You can only browse albums they're in by using the search tab, and downloading a track list from the Spotify servers. Which is a little contrived, and means you can't use Spotify to browse your local music by album or artist if you don't have any network connectivity.
Instead of downloading albums for offline use, you create playlists of tracks (you can auto generate playlists from albums by long-tapping on them), which is something that initially confused me. You can download entire playlists to play from the device's storage with Spotify without streaming them.
I don't think the Android application is finished, but it's a good counterpart to the desktop application, which remains the fastest media player I've ever used. Even for local music it's better than Windows Media Player, and *cough*... iTunes.
Sadly the annoying adverts to get premium on the free version must've got to me, but the amount of music I've discovered a liking for is a worthy trade off for the price.
Totally worth £10.