You’re back home from a tiring day out. You want to relax listening to some music. You have acquired lots of music along your journey throughout the Internet. However, you don’t want to listen to any of it right now. You don’t want to deal with the decision paralysis of youtube or bandcamp either. Furthermore, spotify and friends are out of the question. Lastly, your old radio doesn’t catch any frequency that’s interesting to you.
But there’s hope. While your old radio can’t catch much more than what’s physically near it, the internet radios got you covered.
Internet radios come in many varieties. Some of them are just the internet version of old-school radios, and many of those are mostly available to be listened through their website only, so they can track you, show you ads, or cut the streaming after you haven’t been engaged to their website for some time. Worst case scenario, they require you to get their android/ios app that’s riddled with who knows what.
I won’t bother with those. I will focus on just a few Internet radios that are available both through a webfront and a direct streaming link, so you can tune in using a browser, or a media player when the former is inconvenient.
I can’t start without mentioning tilderadio. Tilderadio is the online radio of the tildeverse. Members of the tildeverse request time slots and stream things to their liking. There are shows dedicated to music playlists and talk shows. Highly recommended.
One of oldest pubnixes is is the Super Dimension Fortress Public Access UNIX system, or SDF for short. The folks at sdf maintain anonradio.net. Like tilderadio, anonradio operates on a volunteer basis, with DJs being members of the sdf. There’s a wide selection of music shows. Rock, synthpop, metal, electronic, dubiousness, partying, languages, old and new. There’s something for almost everybody.
Soma fm is an entirely listener-supported independent radio with as many as 30 channels dedicated to different music genres.
And many more channels for you to explore, playing obscure and popular tracks within the genre of the station.
While lainchan is itself an anonymous image board, with all the controversy that entails, their radio project has given me many hours of enjoyment and i believe it should be treated seperately from the place it comes from. It has 4 channels.
This is an old-school radio station located in Austin, Texas, that happens to have an online streaming channel that fits within the constraints of this guide.
Their focus is classical music. Their offer ranges from Baroque, to the Modern period, including classical arrangements of contemporary pop songs. Chamber, Cantata, Concerto, Mass, Opera, and so on, you can find all of those here. This is the single best radio for all of you classical music fans.
This radio station is also part of the community of an anonymous image board, but it can be safely ignored.
They focus mostly on anime and game soundtracks, if that’s your jam, you will probably like this. It’s also possible to request songs, but i haven’t used this feature, so i don’t know if it works.
Hackers.town is a fediverse instance that also happens to have an radio stream that i discovered by chance. Their music selection is very eclectic, so whatever label i might throw will probably be too narrow. I can’t recommend it enough, very nice tunes there!
These are only a handful of the hundreds, if not thousands, of online radios that you can find online, and they were subject to my own tastes and technical preferences. But surely there’s a radio out there that’s more suited to your own likes. If you feel like exploring this world, i would be thrilled to know your findings and get to know more radios. If you’d like to do so, please mail me to tsui@sdf.org.
Happy listening!