I often notice that I need music to keep my mood up especially when I am alone. To not get myself into managing what to actually listen to but to have it as a background radio would actually be perfect.

If there weren't the commercials. Those live rent free in my head and get more annoying everytime I hear them. I can recite those from decades ago and see it as brainwashing and of course have my mental blacklist to never give money to the annoying ones.

Anyhow. Are commercials especially on the radio as unbearable as they are to me? How do you cope? Is there a (internet) station not overdoing it for you?

I cannot recommend somafm enough. It's a commercial free, listener supported radio network that has several dozen different stations with music from just about every genre you'd want. They don't have commercials but they do have semi-frequent station id stingers (like two or three times an hour) and a couple times a year they have a donation drive to keep the lights on and drop in more requests to donate (like NPR does, but less frequent). My favorite stations are Lush, N5MD, The Dark Zone, Suburbs of Goa, and Groove Salad. Hope that helps!

Yeah, they're pretty cancer. Get yourself an mp3 player, fam. Or internet radio. You lose that sweet fidelity decay that comes from radio band broadcasting but at least you don't have to be advertised to or only hear the top 40 from America every hour

I listen to the BBC, there are no adverts. Particularly BBC Radio 4. It's got very little music, it's mainly documentaries or current affairs or dramas. I ended up finding that it calms me down because I start to recognise the voices of the newsreaders and continuity announcers. If you're outside of the United Kingdom, you may have the BBC World Service available. British BBC radio stations can be found online, though.

The mental blacklist is so relatable, by the way.

Thank you for this recommendation, I just downloaded the app and favorited every station suggestion you made.

I love having music playing but hate getting stuck in my own playlists and genres from the major music stream services. I want the exposure to new artists and styles and love the listener supported angle of this. Thank you!

I can't say I find the ads on the radio stations I listen to especially unbearable, though there's definitely a lot.. but I also mostly listen to the radio for the hosts and not for the music, so there's that

If I want to listen to something I have a playlist of songs I enjoy so I just put that on

I listen to Radio Paradise often. They have a few stations for different moods. It's listener supported and there are no commercials. Just a "thanks for listening to Radio Paradise" a few times an hour.

+1 for SomaFM, love their DEF CON station

Agree re ads.

I know people who like Apple Music. I don’t want a subscription service, but it might suit you?

MP3 player or self-hosted streaming bring music under your control while still allowing portability & arbitrarily long playlists.

Like you, though, I don’t always want to manually curate my playlists. I need to look into self-hosted options that will automatically refine playlists for me similar to how Apple Music does for its users. Open to recommendations!

And if you prefer music, there is BBC Radio 6. Music and hosts talking about music, only interrupted by news once per hour.

BBC Radio 4 Ex too!

I use https://www.radio-browser.info/ to find direct radio stream URLs.

+1 on internet radio

If you like psytrance, Psyndora is a station from Greece that has free streaming and almost never any commercials. I listen to it while I'm working or doing chores.

I don't do apple, but thanks for the recommendation. I'll try soma and BBC for now as per the other recommendations (thanks for/to all of them!).

https://jetsetradio.live/

BBC Radio 6 Music listener here. No ads, and interesting music chosen by its presenters, many of whom used to work in the music industry themselves.

As an organisation, the BBC has its faults, but its Radio output is possibly the best in the world.

Radio 6 seems popular here! Interesting, as I never really considered it. 1 is well known, 2 is moreso my taste, 4 is my favourite as well as my local one. 3 also has the classical music.

Ooo...

It's what my second monitor was made for.

Thanks! This is way better than putting up with Pandora or Spotify's ads to find a new band.

SomaFM and Radio Paradise (already mentioned) are great picks, both listener-supported and basically ad-free. If part of it is the being-alone feeling and not only the music, one more option: I made a small site, coquiet.app. It plays calm ambient music with no ads or talking, and shows how many other people are in the same "room" right now. No account, no chat, nothing to manage. Disclosure: it's my project. It won't replace a good radio host, but some people like the quiet company.

Commercials on regular radio is so bad now, I can take a 45-60 minute drive and not hear a single fucking song the entire time. Just commercials.