Posted 05/08/2026
One of my favorite hobbies is resisting the wills of the suits at big corporations. One realm in which I feel I've gotten the hang of this is the musical world. If you want to "stick it to the man," as they say,* here are some ways to get free music for all time forever... legally, even!
* No one has said this in the past 10 years
Did you know that the majority of radio stations have streams online which you can listen to RIGHT NOW for FREE? Search up "[genre] radio station" online and you'll get 10 different radio stations to choose from instantly. And surprisingly, some of those 10 will actually play good music.
If you want to go hog-wild searching for interesting radio stations, go to radio.garden and spin the globe around to hear the stations of people around the world.
I'm pretty late to the party finding out about these, but my favorite kind of radio station so far has been the community or college radio station. They play music a lot of the time, but many of them also have different talk shows and whatnot that are really interesting. I'll list a few good ones I've found below, though out of these, WUVT is the cream of the crop.
(SPECIAL JOJO2K TIP: some of these stations' streams go over HTTP, so you can even listen to these from your dinosaur computers through software like VLC or WinAmp! Check their websites to find those links!)
Of course, there are also tons of cool internet-only radio streams out there!
One of my favorite aspects of stations like WUVT is that it's ran by a variety of people that can expose you to a whole bunch of music you'd probably never hear about otherwise. So not only do you get non-stop, ad-free music hosted and DJ'd by passionate music lovers, but you also get to learn about different genres you may not have even thought about before. And once you hear about said new music...
If you're going to buy music online, just use Bandcamp. (Since stations like WUVT feature smaller bands and smaller bands love Bandcamp, you'll easily find a lot of great music with the WUVT + Bandcamp combo.)
You can also look up any song that's ever existed and probably find it for free on YouTube, for some of your on-demand listening needs. YouTube is ad-free, too. I mean, you SHOULD be watching YouTube ad-free. (iOS users... psst...)
Bandcamp also has Bandcamp Fridays where ALL of the profit from your music purchases go to the artists. Spotify sure as hell ain't having Bandcamp Friday type of deals. I think the latest cut for artists on Spotify is like $0.003 per stream?
However, this leads us to my next point...
If you're the same kind of odd combination of frugal and music-loving that I am, the radio+bandcamp+album combo is a no-brainer. Let's look at the costs.
At $12.99 per month, Spotify Premium ends up costing about $156 per year. The bulk of tech-centric companies don't stay around forever, so let's assume that Spotify will exist for another 20 years (unlikely) and that Spotify won't raise Premium prices (they will), and you're looking at $3,120 for 20 years of Spotify Premium.
On the flip side, you can hit up a nearby store that sells used CDs and buy 200 CDs at about $5 per CD and spend $1,000 that way. Does YOUR favorite album list add up to more than 200 albums?! Mine might be close, though I think I've largely been listening to Vampire Weekend's discography on repeat for the past few years. I am a simple man of few needs. If you have no such stores near you, or need to find more obscure albums, there's also Discogs. If you buy multiple albums from the same seller on Discogs, you typically save on or get free shipping, and it's 10x the better experience buying music on there compared to say, eBay.
So you buy all the albums you want on CD for super cheap, rip all those and you can do aaaaanyytthiiinnngg you want with those tracks. MP3 files work flippin everywhere. Put those things on your 1998 laptop. Put them on your Wii. Put them on your 3DS. Put them on your iPod. Put them on your bird.
If you're saving a few thousand dollars from not buying Spotify Premium for the next few decades, do you know how many other albums, pieces of merch or concerts that money can buy instead of giving money to the artist-unfriendly military-boot-licking Spotify?! A few! Maybe!
A surprising amount of artists have their own stores and websites where you can buy physical copies of the albums straight from them, or you can buy their albums new, individually, on other major online retail sites. You can drip-feed your favorite artists $0.003 at a time, or you can give them $10-40 TODAY by buying their albums outright. But if you go just a radio+used CD route, you may end up supporting the artists less financially. If that bothers you, you can consider how revenue paid out to artists from radio stations may vary based on the station's listener count. But yeah if they got stuff on Bandcamp or their own individual storefronts, buy their stuff that way. Then discover new music or just have "sound for the background" via various radio stations, since that's half the reason people put music on at times anyways.
In conclusion: have free, soulful music selections played forever right into your earholes with cool things like community/college radio stations. If you're a cheapskate, buy a bunch of used CDs and listen to your favorite albums forever and do whatever you want with the files by ripping those bad boys. If you're able and willing to support the artists more, buy their albums from places like Bandcamp or the artists' individual storefronts.
...hm? What's that? Piracy is an easier method to quickly build a music library? But that has none of the fun of funny little individual memorabilia discs you can display and play in your 2010 Honda Civic's aging CD player... where's your sense of whimsy?
Oh, and by buying new CDs from current artists, I bet this also signals to various parties and companies that people still want FULL OWNERSHIP over the things we pay for! (I also gave up Spotify because there are multiple albums I had saved from them that disappeared or had bits and pieces of albums ripped out due to some stupid copyright deal expiring or something! Do YOU like Spotify/Apple Music/whoever having that control over your music?!)
...for that last part there, I don't judge people who pirate music, especially all the folks who have now been pressured into buying the same album across 5 different formats, and now is socially-expected to subscribe to some service to keep listening to said albums... yeah the music industry is a flippin mess
OH and yeah any library worth their salt - public, school or otherwise - will also have tons of music you can rent and you can try out music for free that way too. Checking stuff out from libraries also helps their funding or something I think, so next time you get a book or movie from the library, grab a random CD while you're at it! It's free, you hear something new and you support your library!! Yay!
But yeah go support artists!!
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