The times we live in promote the short and incisive over the long and in-depth. Yes to Reels, no to long YouTube videos? That is not the correct approach, rather the real power of the Internet lies in the way it is home to diversity.

Radio, the way we knew it, has seen its best days long ago. No longer restricted by the need for an FM transmitter, global music and chatter are available through our laptops and smartphones.

Here are some ways to tune into the “global village” on your computer or smartphone. In some cases, these are broadcast stations that also make their programming available on the web.

Radio.garden

There’s a radio station called Mom’s Spaghetti in Manchester and I discovered it only last week. And now the music plays all day long. Equally enjoyable is Rajbiraj in Nepal and Liquorice FM in Perth. It’s a trippy experience on Radio.garden, which offers the world.

Rotate the digital globe filled with green dots on it and wherever the map stops, expect some good music or talk show coming from there. Or you can key in a country to bring up a long list, like searching with Costa Rica brought me to Actual FM 107.1.

Be it the web version or through a free app on your smartphone, the Amsterdam-based website is a virtual wonderland that is not divided by borders.

Radio.garden is for anyone who likes maps, music, travel and culture. It started in 2016 as a temporary project of the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, designed by Studio Puckey and Moniker, and its popularity has soared.

It truly mirrors the meaning of a “global village”. The website does its best to verify the location of the streaming stations and stay away from stations that do not list their location on their website.

Radiooooo

I recently discovered the station while working on a piece about going beyond streaming algorithms but I will be doing injustice to the station if I don’t dive deeper.

In 2012, artist/DJ Benjamin Moreau came across an old radio and it took into a sound bubble. It was a world not organised by genres. He wondered if there could be a way to organise music not by genres or complex algorithms.

He took the help of his friend Raphael Hamburger, a music producer and soundtrack supervisor with a vast collection of music from all over the world.

What you get today is a world map on which you pick a country, select a decade and choose a mood to enjoy a curated playlist of crowdsourced songs from that time and place.

In 2013, they launched after partnering with Anne-Claire Troubat, an attorney specialising in international business, according to The New Yorker.

Radiooooo has curators who comb through a very long list of submissions from around the world to ensure the songs fit the concept and are of high-resolution. Nostalgia, here we come.

Three D radio

A fantastic offering from Adelaide and it includes aboriginal music in its regular playlists. It has been broadcasting since 1979 as an S-Class community radio station on 93.7 FM across the greater metropolitan area of Adelaide and its surrounding country areas. Run by the Progressive Music Broadcasting Association (PMBA), there are no playlists or rotations on Three D Radio. Each of its 120-plus announcers is free to choose the music that they present.

NTS Radio

Eclectic. That’s the word we can use to define NTS Radio, a global radio platform broadcasting music from dozens of cities around the globe, live all the time. Founded in 2011 by Femi Adeyemi and based at a shopfront studio in Hackney, it had over 2.5 million unique monthly listeners in 2020. Its strength: One of the best sources for underground music. You may end up spending a full day listening to NTS without recognising any artiste but that’s how musicians get discovered.

TuneIn Radio

TuneIn started as a simple directory that became a hot destination for content in a short time. It offers a range of radio stations that includes music of all kinds, sports, comedy, talk radio, news, and many other types of media. With the free version, you can have access to thousands and thousands of stations and the premium version gets you audiobooks and more, besides the removal of advertising. My favourite: Elvis Radio 24/7.