Radio Garden is a website for discovering live radio through a three-dimensional globe: cities with stations appear as green dots sized by the number of channels, and selecting a city lists its stations for immediate listening.

The Radio Garden main interface: a rotatable 3D globe with green dots marking cities that have stations It launched in December 2016 as an offshoot of a transnational radio research project led by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, and it now lists more than 40,000 stations and channels (2024 figure). The site is free, requires no registration, and ships iOS and Android apps.

At a glance

  • URL: https://radio.garden
  • Type: Global radio discovery platform (research-project origin, operated by Radio Garden B.V.)
  • Cost: Free
  • Registration: None
  • Interface language: English
  • Mobile: iOS and Android apps since 2018

Background

Radio Garden was developed between 2013 and 2016 under the supervision of Golo Föllmer of Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, in a project led by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision together with the Transnational Radio Knowledge Platform and five other European universities; its original purpose was studying radio's role across borders. When the site launched in December 2016 it carried about 8,000 stations; by 2024 the official count exceeded 40,000 stations and channels. A rewritten version was released on March 14, 2020. The service is operated by Radio Garden B.V., a company registered in the Netherlands.

Core features

  • Globe browsing: The main interface is a rotatable Earth where green dots mark cities with stations, sized by channel count; zooming into a city lists its local channels.

    After zooming into a city, its local stations can be selected from the channel list

  • Live listening: Streams play directly in the browser over common formats such as MP3, Ogg, and AAC.

  • Search: Added in 2019, search locates stations and cities by name.

  • Historical clips: Beyond live streams, the "History" and "Jingles" sections hold archival broadcast recordings and station idents, preserving the sound of stations that no longer exist.

  • Mobile apps: iOS and Android apps have been available since 2018 with feature parity to the website.

Copyright and content policy

Radio Garden produces no content of its own; it indexes publicly available stream URLs supplied by stations. Listening is free and there is no user-generated content. The platform's constraints come from copyright and neighbouring rights: per its official statement, users located in the United Kingdom have been limited to UK-based stations since 2022, and Turkey has blocked the service since January 2022, with the apps removed from the Turkish stores.

When it is useful

  • Exploring the local stations of an unfamiliar city to hear what is on air there
  • Finding immersive listening material for language learners
  • Sampling a destination's media landscape before a trip
  • Listening to archival broadcasts in the History section
  • Discovering small independent stations from far away

Limitations

  • Users in the United Kingdom can only listen to UK stations since 2022, and the service is inaccessible in Turkey (see the official statement and local network conditions).
  • It depends on each station's own stream URL: shutdowns, address changes, or station-side geo-restrictions break channels.
  • No schedules, lyrics, or playback of past shows — live streams only.
  • The interface is English-only with no official Chinese translation.

Similar services

TuneIn is a search-first commercial station aggregator; WebSDR covers online reception of amateur radio bands and can complement Radio Garden.

References