This Free App Turns Listening To Local Radio Into An Addictive Adventure

Let's be real: Most of us aren't hopping on a plane to sip coffee in a quaint Italian café or eat a bowl of ramen on Tokyo streets this weekend. Instead, we have learned to travel vicariously by scrolling through Instagram reels, watching YouTube videos, and reading written travelogues, at least until our budget, schedules, and visas align. 

But what if there is another way to experience the life and sounds of a faraway place without relying on another person's experiences? Enter Radio Garden, a free app that's not your typical online radio player. Its unique approach to local radio discovery makes it so much more fun and adventurous than scrolling through an alphabetical list of channels on your phone or browsing streaming services that know what to recommend. 

It drops you on a globe, not dissimilar to Google Earth, with thousands of green dots representing the various available local radio channels across the world, and gives you the freedom to choose a live broadcast from virtually any corner of the Earth. In one tap, you can be tuning into a K-pop station from Gangnam, catching a breakfast show from coastal Australia, or dancing to Bollywood numbers from a Mumbai station. Be warned, it's raw, immediate, and addictive.

Based out of Amsterdam, Radio Garden has been around for almost nine years. While it went viral at launch in 2016, Radio Garden became a favorite lockdown era discovery, when folks were looking for some sort of connection with the world at large while isolated in their homes. Radio Garden is available both as a mobile app for Android and iOS, and as a website. 

You can download the apps for free, which are ad-supported. However, if you are not a fan of advertisements, Radio Garden has started offering an in-app purchase that removes the marketing messages and includes support for a sleep timer and family sharing. The primary way to access Radio Garden is by interacting with the digital globe and its green dots, but it does offer a search function, a selection of curated content and playlists, and the ability to set favorite radio stations. 

You can also choose dark mode, change the app language, and select the graphics quality for the globe. There are over 40,000 radio stations on offer from around the world, and this number keeps growing, having jumped significantly from around 7,000 in 2016.