Pretty much everyone I know pays. College students split the family plan so its $2.50/mo. Pretty good considering that would only get you two songs on iTunes.

I'm old-school. I pay so that I can download a whole album on to my phone and listen to it while I'm out walking and not worry about having a good Internet connection. I also hate ads so I'd pay to not have any.

I also listen to my own music files ripped from CD. For that, the Sansa Clip used to be great until the headphone connection broke.

I'd think mostly for the radio-like experience: new music coming into rotation, deep cuts from classic albums, possibly a DJ, etc.

I used Google Music for this, for a while at least, but gave up on it when it became clear that it was inevitably heading for the Google Graveyard. I'm not sure I want to bother with Spotify, and I transcoded my FLACs to Opus to put on my phone's SD card. Foobar2000 for Android takes care of music playing now.

Music discovery and a curated-by-not-yourself playlists are the two big things in my experience. The aim of the game is for spotify to play you music that you didn't realise you wanted to hear, and even better if it's from an artist you don't know.

so you don't have to buy or otherwise acquire the mp3s and then worry about storing them somewhere where you can access them from your phone. unless you have a small library that fits on the phone.

The ads are only for free users