Latest Articles
How to Find the Right Internet Radio Station for Your Taste
Internet radio gives you access to tens of thousands of stations from every country, covering every genre and subgenre imaginable. This is a genuinely wonderful thing. It is…
Talk Radio Explained: News, Opinion, and Why People Listen for Hours
Talk radio is the format that most clearly separates radio from streaming music. You cannot replicate it with a playlist. Talk radio is live, it is time-specific, it…
College Radio: Why University Stations Still Matter
College radio has launched more important music careers than any other radio format. R.E.M., Nirvana, The Replacements, Radiohead, and hundreds of other artists that went on to define…
World Music Radio: Exploring Global Sounds From Your Living Room
World music is a deliberately vague category, and its vagueness is both its strength and its limitation as a radio format. The term covers any music from outside…
The 1990s Radio Sound: Grunge, Britpop, and the Rise of Talk Radio
The 1990s is the decade that contemporary radio nostalgia is currently most focused on. The music of that decade, from Nirvana’s arrival in 1991 to the end-of-millennium pop…
The 1980s Radio Sound: Synth-Pop, New Wave, and the Album Rock Era
The 1980s transformed radio more dramatically than any decade since the transistor made portable radio possible. Stereo FM replaced AM as the dominant commercial medium, the music video…
Rock Radio Formats Explained: Classic Rock, Alternative, Indie, and More
Rock radio is not one format. It is a family of formats that share a common musical DNA but serve quite different audiences and play quite different music.…
Adult Contemporary Radio: The Format That Quietly Dominates the Dial
Adult contemporary radio is the radio format that most people listen to without realising it has a name. If you have ever heard a station that plays a…
Gospel and Christian Radio: Faith on the Airwaves
Religious broadcasting has been part of radio since the very beginning. KDKA in Pittsburgh made its famous first broadcast in November 1920, and by January 1921 it was…
Reggae Radio: Jamaica’s Sound on the Global Airwaves
Reggae is one of the most globally recognisable sounds in popular music, and its presence on radio tells the story of how a small island’s musical culture became…
Blues and Soul Radio: The Roots of Modern Popular Music
Blues and soul are the foundation stones under most of the popular music you hear today. Rock and roll, R&B, hip-hop, country, and jazz all grew from the…
Hip-Hop Radio: From Street Corners to Stadium Anthems
Hip-hop radio has a complicated relationship with the format that made it famous. The genre was born in community spaces in the Bronx in the 1970s, grew through…