Why Spotify?

[Kelleytoons]

Okay, I'll try this again (I thought for sure I posted a message about this, but in my posts lists I don't see one -- it's heck to get old).

I'm about a week away from the end of my free Premium trial and at this point I can't see any reason to continue.  The Radio feature doesn't hold a candle to the one in iTunes, and that's really the only reason I want streaming music.  If I want to listen to music I already know and love I can make my own playlists and stream from iTunes for a $25 yearly fee (so it's always available to me even on my iPhone or iPads).  But what I want is to be able to get a radio station, tailored for me, that has both music I love as well as similar music by artists I don't know about.

With iTunes I'm able to do this fairly successfully and with lists that don't repeat themselves (much).  But no matter what I try in Spotify I end up with lists that consist of the same songs over and over again, and with artists I don't care to hear (you can't exclude artists from the stations as you can in iTunes, but only specific songs).

Given how well rated Spotify is I have to believe I'm missing something.  Is it just as simple as I'm not the target demo?  Or are there features I ought to be exploring that I haven't?  Few of the playlists that come up are anything I'm interested in, and the one or two that seem like they would be something I'd like are not at all.  Perhaps the curators and I just aren't a match.

My next efforts will be to explore Beats, but I'd appreciate ANY advice on what to try before I end this experiment.

[Joe]

If radio is your priority then I'd reommend you take a look at pandora who do just this and nothing else. Spotify excels in the delivering a huge catalogue of high quality recordings but has some work to do with the radio feature.

[dinomight]

To me, radio is just a supplement to Spotify's primary features of collection and  playlist building. Between radio, Discover, and Browse, I've managed to find a tremendous amount of content I wasn't familiar with to add to my playlists; and that's kind of what I see as the end goal...building awesome playlists I can listen to all day if I want and saving albums I love.

I do expect radio to improve a lot when we see more EchoNest influence, but like @Joe said, radio is not the thing to go to Spotify for if that's all you're really after. Pandora is absolutely a fantastic radio only experience...I kind of got bored with it after awhile though because it too tends to play a lot of the same things, and I found I was better off really customizing my experience with my own playlists. I don't think any of the competing services hold a candle to the overall product you get with Spotify.

[Kelleytoons]

Thanks, guys.  That really does help.

I think what this confirms for me is that Spotify is great for folks who don't already have a good catalog.  I have such a great collection of albums of all of my favorite artists, nearly all ripped at CDR 320 (and now stored in Apple's cloud for playback at an equally high rate) that building such a library isn't at all a concern for me.  So it makes sense that Spotify isn't what I need and it's nice to have it confirmed.

I've used Pandora but in addition to the very small catalog (a fraction of the size of iTunes) the audio quality is really bad.  I will say that Spotify Preminum has at least as good a quality as iTunes Radio, which is why I was drawn to test it.  

I guess my next stop is to try Beats out just in case it fits me better but it looks like, at least for my needs, iTunes is the clear winner.  Thanks again for your responses.