Times change, and so does the way we listen to the music. Streaming services are nothing new at this point, but for a long time I’ve been reluctant to them, as I’m rather used to hoarding uncountable numbers of mp3 hand-picked and catalogued on a hard drive. Such habit developed a long time ago when I ran the radioshow on weekly basis and needed to have all the tunes accessible at my disposal.

Recently I dicovered – or rather re-discovered after 15 years – DI.FM radio. It evolved quite a lot since I listened to it the last time somewhere in the high school. Tons of different channels and playlists, carefully selected by curatorst with seemingly good taste – all available on demand. Shortly speaking, the best place to listen to the trance music right now. Despite the large number of channels and diverse content, just a few are enough: I sit at Epic Trance, Progressive, Progressive Psy or Melodic Progressive from time to time and don’t have enough for hours.

So, I went ahead and purchased the two-year subscription for some funny money (first month free). Know that I usually avoid subscriptions at all cost, however this time I made an exception because:

• The music is playing all the time evry day, so I won’t waste the subscription for nothing.
• I can walk away at any time and it won’t impact my business – unlike tons of tools and subscriptions, such as plugins or cloud services that become a commonplace in every industry. Shortly speaking, I don’t need to pay anything to anyone if I don’t want to. I like to own all the tools myself and not depend on anyone else.
• I can see a lot of effort put into the tune selection and DJ mixes, so I can feel I actually pay for something. It’s an ongoing activity delivering the quality content constantly.

Some other places one could listen to trance (ir good music in general) for free are:

• Afterhours.FM – unfortunatelly I realized nowdays there are many no-name DJs playing commercial tunes that just don’t appeal to me.
• Mixcloud – I subscribe to a number of DJs or radios, but they don’t provide content regularly and not often stay consistent with their style. As the same time “search” options is so much hit-or-miss it’s not worth the hassle. There are paid plans, too, but I couldn’t justify subscribing to only one artist for about the same amount I pay for the full access to DI.FM.
• Youtube does have some long streams with live / modular performance, but then it’s not suitable for every occasion. As for regular tunes, it will mostly fall back to greatest (and oldest) hits, so I don’t even try this one.

That’s all for now, but there’s a lot of content coming in the following weeks! Stay tuned.