[biotech]

Not sure I understand the disagreement here; I think you're right on. I had an mp3 player before the iPod came out; it's not like iPod was the first mp3 player. The iPod had a nice external "look" and great marketing, but functionally it was much more difficult to use than other mp3 players that were available at that time. I was told iTunes worked better on the mac, but my experience using it on the PC was nothing short of painful. Other mp3 players had the capability of of using simple drag-and-drop functionality to move your mp3's over to the player, without the need to learn a new program and without forcing a different idea of music library management on the user.

[kungtotte]

The only thing I can remember it having was the smart playlist feature, where you could construct playlists using criteria like "Has at least 3 stars" and "Not played in five days" etc.

Though that was more of an iTunes feature, that I wouldn't mind seeing in Spotify!

It let you make auto-updating lists to keep your library fresh, and not rely on the shuffle feature.