Sarcasm? I’m an iTunes Match user, and while I love the dream, the reality isn’t quite there yet. The experience is pretty choppy, even confusing. (No, I’m not talking about buffering streams.)

Considering iTunes match is one of the best things I've ever used I'm going to say no sarcasm and that you're in the minority.

iTunes Match would have been the best thing I ever used had it come out one (or more) years earlier. Instead, it arrived after I had already tried Spotify, and by then I had tried something better.

Spotify bears no resemblance to iTunes Match so how can it be better?

Offline music. Duh.

Spotify is online music, what are you talking about?

That link explains a mode by which Spotify's cloud based music can be available offline. iTunes Match gives access to YOUR OWN music via the cloud. Do you not see the difference?

I have 15,000 songs in my iTunes library, the vast majority of which are not on Spotify. My 16GB iPhone would normally only hold a fraction of my music but with an iTunes Match subscription I have access to it all.

Also, it gives an off-site back up of every matched song. So tell me, how is iTunes Match similar to Spotify?

Count one more person in that minority..my iTunes match experience has been pretty bad. My songs randomly get grayed out, and if a song has not already been downloaded to a device I own, I'm never sure if it will play or not.

Agreed, the quality of iTunes Match is subpar. The music is slow to load, doesn't sync correctly, is difficult to delete, and is really jittery. I've since tried Pandora One, Grooveshark Pro, and Spotify Premium. By far, I've had the best experience with Spotify. (iPhone 4)

I agree - the service is great, but the client apps are not. In particular, if you have a lot of songs, the iPod app can get really slow and confused (things have improved a bit in iOS 6, but it still crashes on me occasionally, especially when shifting between networks)