Everyone says how DLNA and AirPlay are similar things. As far as I understood, this is simply not true - AirPlay lets an audio stream travel wirelessly to an AirPlay "receiver" which reproduces it, while DLNA has a "player" fetch and playback a piece of audio content residing on "server" side. In short, AirPlay is your wireless equivalent of an audio cable (apart from the endpoints, obviously), while DLNA is more like a wireless media center solution.
If I am not making myself clear:
An instance of Spotify for iPhone, or even Spotify on a Mac with AirFoil software, will happily transmit the audio stream over air to AirPort Express router connected to a pair of speakers. There are no "files" involved, it does not matter to AirPlay what is actually transmitted - it's a stream. This comes to importance because most often we will have Spotify in turn live stream its content, without having any kind of music collection (disregarding the offline playlists feature). With DLNA, it's more like a DLNA player "browses" a DLNA "server" and plays back an item, if it can decode it, that is.
My question is - can DLNA do what AirPlay does?