Yes, we know, everyone loves Spotify (even us). Yes, we know, free music is really sweet, and we feel pretty spoiled for even bringing this up. But Spotify has a ways to go before it's our favorite music app. Here are five things about the new-to-America streaming service that are kinda sucky.

5. The ads are REALLY annoying.

Okay, okay, okay, so we should stop bitching and just upgrade to Spotify Premium if we don't want to listen to ads. We get it. But do they have to be so annoying?

Ads are actually one of the big differences between Pandora and Spotify. For Pandora, the ads can be about anything -- tequila, TV shows, and so on. On Spotify, all the audio ads are for music. On the one hand, that helps keep your listening experience intact, since hearing part of some song is presumably less annoying than hearing about a new show on Fox. On the other hand, we were pretty confused when the next song on Deadmau5's album was a country song (until we realized it was just an ad). It's disorienting.

4. The seemingly awesome "featured playlists" are impossible to find.

The other day we heard an ad for a playlist by some superstar DJ, some kind of ultimate party playlist. It sounded awesome, but we were busy, so we figured we could just go back later and find it. No dice.

Call us stupid, but we haven't figured out how to find a featured playlist without clicking on the ad while it's running. Playlists don't appear in search results, and the Top Lists page only shows the most popular songs, albums, and artists (more on this later). Ever since hearing about the elusive electronica playlist, we've been waiting eagerly for another chance to click on it, but we've only heard a promo for the best country music summer hits. No thanks.

3. You need playlists to come back to the music you've discovered.

If you search for, say, Adele, you can find a bunch of her music and listen to it. Cool so far. But what if you hear a song you really like while you're working on something, and then you want to hear it again later but can't remember what it's called?

Unless you add tracks to a playlist or star them, they aren't added to your library. That, of course, means you have to make playlist after playlist after playlist or add everything to your list of starred tracks, which seems to defeat the purpose. (Being the total neurotics that we are, we have a playlist for each artist we've listened to on Spotify, plus one master "Spotify" playlist for everything we've found, sort of like a library for what we've found online.)

If the idea is for Spotify to be a continuation of your music library, it seems silly that you can't add tracks you like to the library you already have -- especially when you consider our next gripe.

2. The search feature totally sucks.

Try searching for "Adele," and you get something like this:

What we have is, in short, a mess.

The song results aren't organized at all, really -- the first five songs are from three different albums (including one by someone named Beth). Clicking on Adele's name gets you a slightly better page, with her music organized by album, but why does it have to be so complicated (and, honestly, overwhelming) on first use? Compare the Spotify result above to what you get when you search for Adele on iTunes:

A bit easier on the eyes, no?

1. Music discovery sucks on Spotify.

To put it bluntly, it's hard to find new music on Spotify unless you know exactly what you're looking for.

If you want to check out Torches by Foster the People, that's easy -- just search for "Foster the People," and you'll find it. That's great.

But what if, like us, you're looking to expand your musical palette and broaden your horizons? Isn't that one of the most appealing promises of a free music app?

Searching for "electronica," for example, will give you only results that have "electronica" in the album, artist, or song name, which isn't that helpful. There's no way to search by genre, and, as we mentioned above, it's impossible to find those featured playlists that could be a good jumping off point.

The Top Lists page gives you only the music that's most popular in the nation (or world), which isn't really all that helpful if you're trying to find something interesting that isn't Lil Wayne or Bruno Mars. Then there's the Feed page (which seems mostly like an improvised customer support thread between Spotify's feed and random complaining users) and the What's New page (which has only a couple of albums that, frankly, don't appeal to us at the moment).

Spotify itself has even recognized this problem (sort of) with a post last year on third-party sites that help you find playlists. ShareMyPlaylists.com, for example, is an entire website devoted to helping you find Spotify playlists.

Of course, if you've integrated Spotify with Facebook, you can always check out the public playlists your friends have shared -- which strikes us as one of the app's coolest and most promising features. But, alas, most of our friends haven't gotten on Spotify yet, and those who have don't have very many (if any) public playlists. And what happens on the off chance that your friends don't have good taste in music?

Then you're really screwed -- and Spotify's clunkiness is probably the least of your problems.

[Edit: Thanks to lekram for the advanced search tips, but the point stands -- should it really be so hard to figure out how to search by genre?]

----

Follow us on Twitter @SFAllShookDown, follow Dean Schaffer @deans55, and like us at Facebook.com/SFAllShookDown.