Good

Free

Not run by the devil

Pick 2. Actually maybe 1 if you're lucky.

As others have said the high sails are your best bet.

🚢🦜⚓

You can throw some money at artists periodically, some random $10 donation to whatever their fan site or on merch will probably net them more than a lifetime of listening to their stuff on Spotify, since streaming revenues add up to roughly five atoms of currency per stream or so.

Yo, ho, haul together,

HOIST THE COLORS HIGH! 🏴‍☠️

radio

and it comes with free radio waves

its got ads but you don't have to pay for them in bandwidth; the radio station pays for them.

get a radio

Buy on bandcamp and buy cds to rip them. Then host your own plex/jellyfin/subsonic server.

I can't believe no one has mentioned Radio Paradise. Good music. Free app on Android / iOS.

Radio Paradise

Also: SomaFM. Same as above: free, good content, not managed by the devil.

Notable mention: Kexp, The Current

Piracy :3

Start stocking up on CDs and ripping them to FLAC yourself, and self-host those rips on an MPD server. Free streaming from a server you own and control the content on.

the Hoopla app is available for free through public libraries. you can download 15 items (music, movies, books) each month for a week at a time

Did you know you can play music without a service?
Get music, press play. Amazing!
Been doing it for decades

Tidal and Deezer are pretty devilish as they support Israel

I usually just use YouTube

Psst... https://fmhy.pages.dev/

Free and ad-free music streaming (even with some limited local downloads!) supported through many public libraries:

Freegal Music

Create your account with your public library card and gain access to all the music unlimited ad-free streaming. I also get 5 free downloads of songs a week for local storage, but I don't know if that varies by library. There is a web client and the Android app is pretty decent too.

soma.fm I've discovered a lot of cool artists. Love the groove salad channel.

Shazam app with youtube.com plus ezmp3.cc

Long answer:

Cloud infrastructure is expensive. You won't find any free streaming platform.

The best route is to manage your own Playlist manually.

Workflow:

Interesting music playing on radio/party

-‐> shazam to know title and artist 

-‐> search youtube.com for that title and artist 

--> copy url of video that best matches 

--> paste url on ezmp3.cc for converting to audio 

--> await conversion, download generated audio 

--> Use a smart-mp3-tags app to add tags and album art automatically

Prons:

• until now, i've paid $0 for music I listen to. Evil bastard, I know. I, however, have bought poweramp for $5. Best purchase yet.
• you will find any music this way no matter how niche and weird it is. Unlike surfing the pirate ship
• bonus: you most definitely will find your favorite audiobooks.

Cons:

• no music discovery features. Which is truly the only downside you can't replace.
• no backup in case of device loss, so you better make copies manually

Bandcamp kinda counts

Maybe pick a few radio stations you like.
I donated to rtrfm.com.au