Radio Garden

TuneIn and Apple Music Radio are search / list-based — you type a station name or browse by genre. Radio Garden is exploration-based — you spin a 3D globe and click any green dot to hear the local radio of that city. The use case is discovery: 'what does radio sound like in Tashkent right now?' rather than 'play BBC Radio 4.' For find-and-listen workflows TuneIn wins; for stumble-and-discover workflows Radio Garden is unmatched. Both are free; TuneIn has ads on the free tier, Radio Garden's website has display ads but the radio streams themselves are uninterrupted.

Yes — free to use the web app and listen to any station, no signup required. There is a Radio Garden+ paid tier ($1.99/month) that removes the website's display ads, unlocks favorites cross-device sync, and supports the project. The radio streams themselves are unmodified — Radio Garden just provides the player and the globe UI — so ad-supported stations still broadcast their normal ad breaks. Free is enough for most users; the paid tier exists primarily as donation support.

Radio Garden aggregates publicly-broadcasted radio streams that stations themselves publish (FM/AM stations that operate online streaming, plus pure-internet radio stations). Coverage is broadest in Europe, North America and South America; emerging-market coverage (Africa, parts of South Asia) is thinner. Station status is monitored and dead streams are removed. Listeners do not pay anything to stations; Radio Garden does not pay licensing fees because it links directly to the stations' own publicly-available streams, which is the same model as a radio tuner pointing at FM frequencies.

Partially — the PWA caches the globe interface and station metadata, so you can browse the map offline. Streaming audio obviously requires a connection. There is no offline-download mode (radio is inherently live). For users wanting offline audio, podcast apps (Pocket Casts, Overcast) are the right tool — Radio Garden is specifically about live, of-the-moment broadcasts.

Radio Garden's user base is curious internet citizens — language learners (tuning into French / Spanish / Mandarin radio for immersion), expats homesick for stations from their home country, music discovery enthusiasts seeking out genres unavailable on Western streaming services (Sertanejo from Brazil, Rebetiko from Greece), and travelers preparing for trips by listening to local radio. It has been featured in The Guardian, NPR and dozens of design blogs as one of the most-loved single-purpose web apps of the past decade. Daily active users number in the hundreds of thousands.