CyberpunkLibrarian

Absolutely! VLC can stream it as well as a bunch of other software. I think the default audio players on most of the big Linux distros will play Icecast streams. My daily driver is macOS and I use an app called Broadcasts that does nothing but play music from audio feeds. Most of them are Icecast stations.

Shoutcast is still around, but it's proprietary and costs money. It's still a viable alternative to Icecast but I think you'll find more Icecast based services around simply because of the price. That, and Icecast has been around for a long time, so it's kind of a known system. But yeah, tens of thousands of audio and video feeds still run on Shoutcast. They even have a directory to help you find them.

There are tonnes of Icecast stations out there, and I occasionally stream on my own. The great thing about it is that Icecast streams are highly portable so you can embed them into websites (which is what I do), or throw them into apps, or stream them through VLC, or whatever. Some sites will have some kind of chat or whatever, but the best thing is that you can kinda do whatever you want once you get an Icecast player working on a website or in an app.

For a while there was a glorious thing called Radio Free Fedi but, sadly, it shut down. Such a cool concept too!

As an aside, if you're going to request that the library buy any materials, no matter what they're about, try to let them know that you want them to purchase physical materials. By that I mean print books, Blu-Rays, CDs, etc. When a library purchases a physical item, they can do anything they want with it and they can keep it until it falls apart. They can't do that with digital items, which need to be licensed and re-licensed again to keep the items in circulation. Not only is it an advantage for the library to own a physical object, it's often less expensive to buy print and physical than it is to license eBooks and digital content.