In the wake of multiple posts about alternatives to Spotify - this one in particular - I think I should really do some shilling for my music service of choice: a Shoutcast station that's been running since 2000, more or less the heyday of early Internet music streaming.
That "station" is a whole network of genre-focused streams, listener-supported, completely ad-free, and always a wild ride no matter what time of day.
That would be SomaFM.
They are around 30 different stations, each focused around a genre or mood. And I'm not talking about the bare basic "classic rock", "country", or "we play Everything!" stations that make up so much of the actual FM airwaves today. There are stations for 50s/60s exotica, 70s album-rock, 80s synth pop, ambient drones in both "ethereal and relaxing" and "oppressive and gloomy" flavors, there's a station that mixes smooth electronic noise with indistinct police-scanner chatter, there's one that splices funky, jazzy, and groovy spy movie soundtracks with random James Bond quips between songs, there's one that plays "songs you know, by artists you don't." Always flavorful, never cut-and-dry. The 80s station purposely avoids playing the Billboard hits and puts on B-sides and album tracks from the bigger artists. I'll put on Illinois Street Lounge, Underground 80s, or Secret Agent when I don't feel like mashing the Random button a hundred times on my 250 GB music library.
The best part about SomaFM, though, is that it'll play on damned near anything with a CPU and an internet connection. Because, 24 years down the line, they're still using Shoutcast - the Winamp radio-streaming system - anything from the year 2000 onward that supports Shoutcast can stream SomaFM for less bandwidth than you'd expect. There's a browser player right there on the website if you click "Listen now", but they also offer free mobile apps with no ads or interruptions, and if you have a random old computer itching to be useful, you can install something like foobar2000, Winamp, Audacious, Amarok, XMMS, even some random obscure 90s MacOS program, and connect to their non-SSL streams and immediately get served with a genuinely enjoyable music experience. Even on something as old as a Pentium 2 with 32 MB of RAM on Windows 98.
It is, and I don't exaggerate, my favorite way to discover new music, because there is always something I don't recognize on the playlist. Even forgotten tracks by artists I've been listening to all my life. They're not run by any corporate interests, they're safe to connect to from a machine without AdBlock support, and even if you're trying to meter your bandwidth, you can still pull up a 32 kbps AAC stream that'll sound just fine (and might even bring back memories of that random AM radio station up in the mountains that you found at half past midnight).
I've been thinking about making a post about web radio but have been neglecting to get around to it... as with lots of stuff. Life is hard. Anyway, I think that finding new-to-you music through (real, not computerized) DJs, be it club style or radio style, is the best passive way to do it, and people should take it very seriously. If you care about music, you should care about how you ingest it. I'm a huge proponent of it.
I think algorithm services like Spotify need to die because you will not have a "good" version of it in any scenario. This means not using them, full stop. The endgame is always going to be "what acceptable background noise can I spit out for the least amount of money" and that's going to fuck over the people that make the music in the process, every time. You either do the active work to make your own playlists, mixtapes, DJ mixes, whatever, which is very fun! Or, you trust another human to do it for you. Maybe friends, maybe a DJ. Not someone else's computer.
I would also like to add another station to the list:
Rinse FM
I'll keep this really short since I only found out about the web radio through some active mix digging a few months ago. Rinse was a very important pirate radio station in London and later became a legal radio station. They now have a web radio, and they play dance music.
They also now run Kool FM, which was also a pirate station, later ran legally, now ran as web radio, with more of a Jungle/DnB focus. This is what I usually listen to. You want to actually keep up with new Jungle and DnB? This is the place to go.
They also run SWU, which I honestly know nothing about, and a french version of Rinse.
They of course just have The Website, and it's also pretty decent for finding old shows or otherwise existing stuff to listen to. And if you live in or around London I think it's still on DAB? Maybe? But then you probably already knew they existed.
If you're like me and you just want a URL to open locally, they're easy enough to dig out of the network inspector. But in case you didn't want to,
https://streamer-uk.rinse.fm:8443/stream - Rinse UK
https://radio10.pro-fhi.net/flux-trmqtiat/stream - Rinse FR
https://admin.stream.rinse.fm/proxy/kool/stream - Kool FM
https://admin.stream.rinse.fm/proxy/swu/stream - SWU
I couldn't get Rinse France to load, will try again tomorrow.
The only downside is if you want to actually know what song is playing, you're relying on the DJ to shout it out. And, if you're an american that struggles to decipher american english sometimes (hi), making out a thick english accent saying a word that isn't spelled the expected way can be a struggle.
I'm sure there's other small web radios out there for all kinds of music. I'd love to have a big list of them. One might already exist, I never got around to starting that research.
