I am absolutely sure that searching and downloading/streaming music would be a standard feature of every music player out there were it not for copyright.

Spotify's real innovation is not music streaming. That technology is not new in any way. The real innovation is the fact it somehow obtained the licenses necessary to legally stream the music people wanted to listen to.

Which is why the criticism that they “don’t care about music” is so silly- that’s not the thing you make money by caring about. They cared about legal stuff.

And phones don't have Winamp...what is OP expecting people to do, download MP3s on Napster and sync it with iTunes?

Even though it was taken down from the store, you can still sideload a Winamp apk if you really want to

There's also PowerAmp which (iirc?) was a fork from the apk. It's not perfect, but it's better than most players.

Not to mention their recommendations which I find to be quite decent.

I think there's very few people who would fit in to the internet speed range of "capable of streaming music consistently enough to prefer that over downloading" and "downloads slowly".

Finding and downloading mp3's isn't a problem.

If my friend tells me to check out a song or an album, I type in the first word or two of that song or album into spotify and I'm listening to it instantly, whether I'm on my phone or my computer.

Do you really think there's no difference there? If you get a text from a friend saying check out this song and you're out and about on your phone, are you really saying that somehow downloading an mp3 to your phone is as easy as spotify?

It's more than just that. Maintaining your personal catalog of <10,000 songs is halfway doable, but it gets pretty hard after that. Spotify does all that for you and even handles things like making sure "ke$ha" and "kesha" both return the same results.

Napster was pretty close to that

You couldn't play immediately, lots of new releases were fake and artists didn't get anything from it. But that close.

Napster's assets were sold (eventually) to Rapsody, which operated a "Napster" service that was a lot like spotify.