It’s been a long while since I subscribed to one of the big players in the music streaming market, although I had account at most of them. I think my favorite experience was with RDIO, so of course that’s the one that ceased to exist first.
These days I’m mostly back to owning music. Beyond bandcamp, I’m actually buying physical CDs again. Even the odd cassette, but maybe I’ll write about that later a bit more.
If someone points me to some new music, I’ll hop over to Spotify, Youtube or Bandcamp to listen in, but if I like it in the long run, I want to have it downloaded somewhere, preferably legally.
But for background noises, I like some services where you get your music in a random access mode, no preselected albums, artists or even playlists. Basically what you had with old-fashioned radio, just without the annoying DJs. (Speaking Radio, is everyone familiar with radio.garden yet?)
A few of my favorite small-time streaming sites:
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Music For Programming – Does what it says on the box, good background music when I’m working. I just pick a playlist by random, and most of them are rather ephemeral, which also means that I don’t have favorites.
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Synthwave Live – I recently came upon that as a side project by Blake Watson, who did HTML for People. It basically collects the Syntwave mixes from YouTube in a site that’s easy to navigate. Includes a rather neat popup player.
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soma.fm – This might be the internet’s favorite “alternative” radio station collection. I should actually go there more. Favorites include Vaporwaves and Deep Space One.
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Poolsuite – A rather retro experience, starting from the website. It feels a bit like an attempt at LVMH Vaporwave, but sometimes you feel like that. Favorites: Tokyo Disco and Hangover Club.
