To keep your ISP from slipping ads into the audio stream? To keep RIAA from finding out what you're streaming and suing you into oblivion?

And, more importantly, to keep misconfigured network appliances from treating every resource on the web as HTML and trying to shove ads into it, breaking audio players.

Because some browsers get annoyed and put up lots of alerts if they can't make a https connection

Rusty, of SomaFM fame? What a blessing to see you here! Mega fan, proud SomaFM mug owner from Australia :)

A static site? Because any hop can inject arbitrary code which your browser will then execute.

TLS doesn’t just offer confidentiality, it also offers integrity.

It doesn’t “just” work, I just implemented a streaming radio client and the http streams were a nightmare