LIVE365 has that limitation in place (I believe) because they have a concern about the servers being over loaded with requests for listener count. However, it does unfortunately provide slightly less fresh data, so that is not desirable.
As for shoutcast servers, there are two applications that I know of that can pull the listener count from shoutcast servers. One is a Yahoo! Widget which you can get here
http://widgets.yahoo.com/widgets/shoutcast-monitorThe other is called Radio Toolbox and can be obtained here
http://www.radiotoolbox.com/downloads/The nice thing about Radio Toolbox is that it can show you charts of the usage and also shows the song that was playing at the time of the listener count change.