Exactly what I do.It at l least gets variety. Good for a party. But if I want to just listen to a particular type of Jazz, they suck. I can't put it any other way. They play the artists that anyone vaguely familiar with the genre can name... over and over w/o even going deep into their music!
Maybe it's what I like to listen to? I often end up with who is this artist when I enter a name. Or, at one time this artist was associated with such and such and the station morphs to something I didn't want. Even if that's what they're not known for. I've ended up deleting too many stations after I tried giving thumbs up or thumbs down because it ends up somewhere besides what I wanted
I will give that Pandora isn't as bad for mainstream music. Still, much better options out there, just takes time to find them.
I used Tidal for the trial period and decided that I didn't like the way I needed to search and it wasn't worth the cost, to me, but I did hear music that didn't seem to be available on Pandora- I now hear a lot of those tunes. Maybe it was a licensing issue.
I used to listen to the Beyond Jazz channel on XM but they removed it before the merge. That was the one channel I really liked, although they also played some good Prog Rock. I called to cancel and, unknown to me, continued to bill me at almost $30/month. The fact that my plan's price had risen so much was a major factor in my cancellation, but they said they wouldn't give me a refund. At this point, I wouldn't pee on them if they were on fire.
I came to the conclusion a long time ago that most of the music I like doesn't fall under the classification of 'popular', but that doesn't bother me. When I worked in a stereo store, I would bring music from home to demo equipment and constantly heard "This is good- who is it?". When I told them, they mostly asked "Who?" and I would say "Exactly". Eventually, we gained a reputation for "being the place to go" for a certain segment of the population- the classical people went to a couple of dealers, hard core/metalheads went to another and we were more eclectic. That had an interesting consequence- among our regular customers were a member of Talking Heads, members of Violent Femmes, BoDeans, a touring member of Genesis/Phil Collins, and many musicians who played locally, including a few professors/faculty at the local music schools, partially because we were close to their locations.
