Streaming music comparisons and quality

Pandora's Genome technology is easily the best. No comparison. I agree with Vhiner; it is spooky how well the technology seems to always not only play the music I like based the on thumbs up/down input, but also in suggesting new music. But alas, not supporting high bitrate is what killed it for me. I tried and liked MOG but my workplace blocks it, so now I'm using Spotify. The extensive library and high bitrate is great but the Radio feature(supposed to emulate Pandora's Genome) really sucks. It always plays the same songs and plays a lot of crap I don't like.

I don't believe that MOG has any significant uphand on Spotify. I did a little research on the web. Anybody know for sure differently?

Here is the response I got from Spotify regarding higher resolution files:

The majority of tracks in Spotify are of a high-quality at 320kbps, apart from a small portion of our catalogue (less than 5%), which is currently only available in 256kpbs.

As for your mobile, 320 kbps is available under the setting of 'Extreme Quality'.

There's more on this here: http://www.spotify.com/help/faq/tech/codec-quality/

If there's anything else you'd like to ask us, just let us know.

Otherwise, have a... http://open.spotify.com/track/6Pi1WqBTTSjtl6BWHQSccH

My quibble with Spotify are the gaps in its back catalog. For example, MOG has the entire Verve archive. Last time I checked Spotify did not.

Ideally, I'd like to have all three services. Right now, though, it's Pandora for music exploration, MOG for focused attention and Redbook and high res when I'm in the mood for deep listening. Will we ever see 44 .1 streaming?

Also...Spotify has a lot of omitted tracks on albums especially if they are over 10 minutes.

I agree with Vhiner, the services aren't directly competitive, which you prefer depends on how you want to listen at any given moment and to some extent on what kind of music you listen to most.

I subscribe to Mog, Pandora One and eMusic and have used Spotify occasionally. Pandora is great for throwing unexpected but interesting new music at you and the algorithm works pretty well as long as there's a lot of similar music in their catalog. If you favor distinctive and difficult to classify musicians, however, the playlists can drive you crazy.

I love Anouar Brahem, for instance, but an Anouar Brahem channel on Pandora serves up a lot of insipid soft jazz and the more time you spend training it the more often it plays the same few performers over and over.

All those sources mentioned are great resources and, fortunately, they have different strengths. Even if you pay for subscriptions to all of them the volume of music instantly available makes them an incredible bargain.