One word: Discovery.

College radio is excellent for this. My favorite DJ has been on 4 hours a week for a decade, and most of the music is new to me. Half is OK in the background, there can be a handful of awful grindy noise bleh, but another bunch of it is often great, and there are amazing gems that have taken my listening off into new frontiers — from Bevis Frond to Gravitar to Mono to Expo 70.

The most common question the kids ask is: How can you listen to that? The answer is: I’m happy to listen to unfamiliar and even unpleasant music if that’s the price to discover something completely unexpected and amazing.

I listen to international radio, mostly for countries where I have previously lived (a handful). I also listen to some online radio stations, particularly Radio Paradise and soma.fm .. I've donated to both in the past.

I have Spotify, and I have about 1500 artists that I follow, but even their algos keep feeding me the same stuff all the time. And there's no "flow" between songs in "Built for you" playlists (Youtube Music, as well).

And sometimes, for certain kinds of moods, I want to listen to music where I don't understand the lyrics. International radio is great for that, even when the DJs/announcers break in and talk.

That said, I never ever listen to real radio anymore, and I'd only really do that in my car. I move around the US West a lot, and updating my radio presets for the 3-4 locations I'm in frequently is harder to manage than online radio platform presets.

I especially like radio for video games. Certain games really lend themselves to it. Like Euro Truck Simulator. Driving a lorry around Sweden, making deliveries while listening to local radio, makes for quite an immersive experience.

I think that there is something to be said about professionally curated music. Most terrestrial radio is irrelevant (in the US at least, thanks to ClearChannel) but I've been listening to SomaFM for awhile now and genre for genre I like it better than what any algorithm has put together.

I'd happily listen to a Spotify playlist if i could reliably discover playlists in specific genres that have a good mix of stuff and are regularly updated. Spotify doesn't seem to have an interface for that.

Not that radio is always well-curated either!

Haha I use YouTube as my music player or soundcloud/bandcamp

Podcasts are hard to listen to while writing code imo/same with new music I usually loop stuff I already know.