Radio Garden

My recent favourite music subscription isn’t to a platform – it’s to an app called Radio Garden, which doesn’t host any music of its own, but is a collection of live radio stations from all over the world.

Most of these are online stations, but there’s a bunch of broadcast stations on here too. You can browse using a map, you can search by location or genre, or you can dive into their curated lists of stations.

I like that it’s live – it’s here, now, and it’s gone after. Of course, I’m just describing radio, but I haven’t listened to – or felt like listening to – a local radio station since I was 15. Also, the music playing here is curated by someone (I’m taking that on trust, but I think it’s true for enough of them to work for me). There’s also talk radio stations on the map, but I’m not interested in those.

My current rotation is a classic jazz station in France, a modern jazz station run from a US college campus, an Afro Jazz station in Berlin, and a Hindustani classical station in my city which isn’t on any local radio frequencies.