The barrier to listening to international radio has collapsed. Twenty years ago, hearing a Japanese pop station or a French news broadcast required a shortwave radio and considerable patience. Today you can stream almost any FM station in the world on your phone within seconds. This guide explains how to access global radio, which apps and services work best, and what to do when a station is not available.
The best radio streaming apps
TuneIn Radio is the largest single aggregator of internet radio stations, with access to over 100,000 stations worldwide. It is available on smartphones, smart speakers (Alexa, Google Home), smart TVs, and car infotainment systems. Radio Garden is a different approach: a 3D globe on which you can spin to any city in the world and listen to local stations — excellent for discovery. iHeart Radio serves US stations primarily. Radio.net covers European stations particularly well. Simple Radio is a clean, easy app for mobile use.
Broadcaster apps and on-demand archives
Major public broadcasters all have their own apps. BBC Sounds gives access to all BBC radio stations live and as on-demand catchup. NPR One and local NPR station apps serve US public radio. ABC Listen covers Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio. These broadcaster-specific apps carry content not available on aggregator platforms — particularly on-demand programmes and extensive archives. They are the best way to access the full output of a broadcaster you want to follow regularly.
Geo-blocks and smart speakers
Some stations block listeners outside their home country due to music licensing agreements. A VPN (virtual private network) can route your connection through a server in the target country, giving you an apparently local IP address. This is widely practised by diaspora communities listening to home-country radio. Smart speakers — Amazon Echo, Google Home, Apple HomePod — have become one of the primary ways people listen to radio at home. Asking Alexa or Google to play a specific station works for most major stations in TuneIn’s database, making radio access as simple as saying the station’s name.
Finding stations you do not know
Radio Garden is the best tool for discovery by geography. If you want to find radio from a specific country, city, or region covered in one of the guides on this site — whether that is West African radio, Celtic music, or Persian radio — Radio Garden will find working streams with a single spin of the globe.