Several movie and TV sites have come and go where you can just visit and watch without even creating an account. Quality might not be as good as a paid service and they are no doubt in the grey-to-red zone legally. I don’t see the same service for music.
Why do you think is there such a difference in trends?
The radio has been playing free music since 1906.
None of them could compete with Youtube
People don’t like to hustle with pirate sites if given reasonable alternatives. Currently youtube, spotify, apple music and online radio stations fulfill these demands. Just like netflix originally killed most of pirate streaming, it was easier just to pay a bit to get all the content, then content providers decided each to create their one limited content service and pirates were back in business. Once you’ll have to pay a different providers to hear different songs you’ll start seeing more and more pirate music streaming sites.
You look at the screen while watching video, making ads profitable (they obstruct the view making you click something to close it, hijacking the click and generating visits).
If you do it for music people walk away and nobody clicks on the ads.
Spotify will force you to listen to an ad by pausing it if you mute the volume, then resuming it when you unmute.
I quit Spotify long ago so I don’t know if they still do it today, but they do have a way to force ads.
The payout for audio ads is a lot less than video advertising. It’s just not as profitable to do an entirely ad-supported music streaming service as a video one
RIAA was famously litigious but music was also much more widely available to pirate so it made it harder for streaming services to offer enough value to tempt users away from piracy. Services like pandora that (originally, at least) offered good value in terms of music discovery were the only ones to really offer a compelling reason not to pirate.
When it comes to movies, though, the much larger file sizes kept piracy a more niche activity for longer. When I was in uni pretty much everyone was running Kazaa or similar for music, but only techy folks would put in the effort to pirate videos.
For Creative Commons music,
Jamendo Radio has many genre channels of radio to listen to:
