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).
