Free services like Pandora and iTunes Radio are radio stations with ads....
Paid services like Spotify and Beats give you unlimited and ad-free access to millions of songs....
I have bought a yearly subscription to Beats, based on my experience with MOG.
Beats seems to have inherited the MOG library after it bought MOG, but it removed MOG's Artist Radio, which made MOG usable in a Pandora-like fashion, getting the best of both worlds.
Since the removal of Artist Radio, I almost never listen to Beats anymore, even though I have paid for it. Their Sentence feature is a joke and most of the curated playlists are a joke as well.
Beats is so bad that I find that I am back to listening to Pandora most of the time now, even though the streaming quality is lower, at 128k for the free version and 192k for the paid version.
I am not a big fan of Spotify, since their library seems to have less original tracks and more covers (Rdio is similar) than MOG/Beats, but they have a feature similar to Pandora/MOG's Artist Radio so I will probably go with them for a Beats replacement. Pandora has the best song selection algorithm I have ever seen, however.
Beats Music seriously sucks as a streaming radio, or for playlists. Plus they don't even have a desktop app, so you have to play in-browser.
Beats paid $15 million for MOG and ruined it, then Apple paid $3 billion to Beats three month later.
