Recently, BCC reader and artist Martin Sollanych reminded me of a site I’m pretty sure I mentioned in this space back around 2016. It goes by the name Radio Garden and operates from the eponymous URL radio.garden.
He tells me he recently discovered Radio Garden on someone else’s post, and although he hasn’t used it regularly, he sees it as a way of exploring the world via radio stations at a time when we can’t really travel. He adds that while painting he usually uses his own playlists or YouTube, but that he gets annoyed by too many ads. He also notes that Stingray (free with Optik and Shaw TV) used to be good for streaming but that there are some ads there as well.
Radio stations and the internet have formed connections from the earliest days of the World Wide Web. Some readers may even have experimented with their own streaming station in those early years of free websites and streaming services. Who remembers Geocities? I remember briefly running a streaming station under the brand Rainforest Radio, but that ended after running a few playlists of mainly Eagles and CCR tunes!
Those earliest days of streaming also overlapped with the birth of the MP3 file format and massive copyright infringement with the likes of Napster and, a little later, torrenting services. Those in turn led to the collapse of physical format music sales, and, subsequently, the rise of commercial streamers such as Spotify.
Radio Garden began as a special web project in Amsterdam in 2016, an exhibition commissioned by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. Essentially Radio Garden lets you tune in to thousands of live radio stations by pointing at places on a spinning globe. The globe is pictured as a garden, and the stations are the seeds within that garden.
As the site proclaims, “By bringing distant voices close, radio connects people and places. From its very beginning, radio signals have crossed borders. Radio makers and listeners have imagined both connecting with distant cultures, as well as re-connecting with people from ‘home’ from thousands of miles away.” With that in mind, the globe used in Radio Garden has no borders.
In 2018 iOS and Android apps were introduced, and in 2020 the entire platform was reimagined with a focus on the mobile experience. In the Google Play store the Radio Garden app receives a very high 4.7 score from more than fifty thousand reviews, drawn from over five million downloads.
Here’s a recent review posting by user Jim Engwall: “The world at your fingertips, literally. Love tuning into unique sounds from every corner of the earth. From religion to rock and roll, I love hearing what’s playing along the Amazon River or Cairo’s nightlife or the Qur’an broadcast from the Arabian Desert. Much easier than using shortwave and a lot better content.”
Presumably, some percentage of those more than five million Android users are paying the $3 fee to remove visual ads from the mobile app. Those ads really aren’t intrusive; presumably, they (or the removal fee) contribute to the server fees for maintaining the platform.
Perhaps Radio Garden’s greatest appeal comes from randomly spinning the globe and selecting a “seed” to explore one or more of the radio stations broadcasting at that location. It could be in central Texas, or on the coast of Sicily. You’ll be listening to live radio as the residents in those areas experience it. Radio Garden will show all the stations in an area as soon as you begin listening to one of them.
If you run across stations you really enjoy, simply flag them with the “like” icon and they will be added to a Favourites group with their call letters and current branding (for example CFMI-FM Rock 101).
Try a search. I used Belarus. The globe spun until the view was centred on Belarus. A list of a dozen or so popular stations appears. Below them is a list of major cities. I selected Minsk, the capital city. That expanded out to a list of 33 stations, from which I randomly picked Radio Relax, which happened to be playing a Mariah Carey song.
As I wrap up this column, listening to a pleasant station in Grand Prairie, TX, I find myself thinking of the recent turmoil in the Vancouver scene, with layoffs at CKWX News 1130, and a complete makeover for long-time all-sports station TSN 1040, coming back in a nearly employee-free recorded comedy format.
Give Radio Garden a shot (on the web at radio.garden, or via the mobile app), but don’t forget about local radio!
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