MPlayer is an extremely versatile open source media player that can be surprisingly useful at the Linux command line.
MPlayer has a slew of command-line options to set depending on your situation. I wanted to listen to the local college radio station here in Raleigh (88.1 WKNC, they’re pretty good!), and so after grabbing the streaming URL from their website, all that took to get my radio up and running, no GUI or web player needed, was: