Every so often we look at where the stream is being opened. This summer the map surprised us: more than forty countries in a single month, and a long tail of places with a handful of listeners each.
The largest audiences are where you would expect — Switzerland, Sri Lanka, India, Canada, France, the United Kingdom, Germany and Australia. But it is the small numbers that stay with us: four listeners in a Norwegian fishing town, one in Reykjavík, eleven in Kuala Lumpur who all tune in for the Saturday countdown.
Radio as a room
Community radio in the diaspora does something a playlist cannot: it puts everyone in the same room at the same time. When RJ Mathu reads a dedication at 20:15 Zürich time, it lands in a kitchen in Scarborough and a night shift in Doha simultaneously.
“Distance should never mean silence. That sentence is the whole reason this station exists.”
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