[simias]

Well, in fairness I live in Europe so I've never used Netflix, however I've heard a lot of good things about this service, not the least on HN.

My point was that if you have a free (albeit illegal) concurrence, if you want to keep your market share you have to give some added value. For services like Spotify, the added value is that you have access to a big catalog of tracks that you can listen to instantly without having to double check for quality and authenticity. You can listen and share those tracks across computers and devices transparently. It's more convenient than bittorent and it's legal.