Is internet radio free, and is it legal?
Yes to both for ordinary listening: broadcasters publish their own streams and pay the music licences themselves.
Why free is the normal case and not a trick
Radio has been free at the point of listening for a hundred years, under every funding model anybody has tried: advertising, a licence fee, a public budget, donations and volunteers. The broadcaster is the customer of the rights holders, not you, and putting the same output on the internet did not change that.
What the internet did change is the cost of an extra listener. A transmitter costs the same whether one person or a million are listening; a stream costs bandwidth per person, every hour. That is why stations cap how many listeners they serve at once, and why nobody here copies a stream: the listener count belongs to the station, and so does the decision to keep the door open.
Where listening ends and something else begins
Opening a stream a broadcaster published to the public, from wherever you are, is the case for essentially everybody reading this. Three things are not that. Recording a programme to a file is a copy, and what you may do with it depends on the broadcaster's terms. Serving somebody else's stream inside your own station or site is redistribution, which is a conversation with the broadcaster rather than something a directory can grant. And where a broadcaster has fenced a stream by territory, their server refuses and we leave it refused.
Nothing on this site records anything, and no feature here is designed to help you do it.
What this site does, and what it never touches
The catalogue comes from radio-browser.info, an open community database of station entries that anybody can correct. We did not build it and we do not own it. A snapshot is published nightly, this site reads it, filters it under rules it publishes in full, and prints pages from the result.
When you press play, your browser opens a connection to the broadcaster's own server. Nothing is proxied, re-encoded or cached, and no audio is stored anywhere in this system: the station gets a real listener counted in their own statistics. A station that does not want a page here does not get one, and there is a page written for broadcasters covering removals and the far more common request, which is a correction.
What the product itself costs
The web player is free and has no paid tier at all: every station page, country hub and language shelf works identically for everybody, with no account and nothing withheld. Free on Chrome. World Radio Pro on Chrome is an optional one time unlock, priced on the store listing. The free extension carries the whole catalogue, the search, the shelves, the filters, the equalizer and the spectrum wall; the unlock adds the alarm, the sleep timer, the other deck finishes, unlimited saved stations and the removal of the promotions bar.
One line of honesty: we are not lawyers and nothing here is legal advice. The above describes how broadcast licensing and stream hosting work, which is knowable. What applies to you specifically, if you intend to do anything other than listen, is a question for somebody qualified to answer it.
People also ask
All answersCommon questions
- Is internet radio free to listen to?
- Yes, in the overwhelming majority of cases. Stations publish their streams to the public and fund themselves the way they always have, through advertising, a licence fee, a public broadcaster budget or donations. A small number of services charge for a subscription stream, and those are not the kind of station a public directory carries.
- Is it legal to listen to a radio station from another country?
- Listening to a stream a broadcaster has published to the public is ordinarily just listening, in the same way that picking up a shortwave signal from abroad always was. What changes the picture is doing something other than listening: recording it, rebroadcasting it, or presenting somebody stream as part of your own service. We are not lawyers, and if you plan to do any of those three, ask the broadcaster first.
- Does World Radio cost anything?
- Free on Chrome. World Radio Pro on Chrome is an optional one time unlock, priced on the store listing. The web player in your browser is free and has no paid tier at all: every country page, every language shelf and every station page works the same for everybody.
- Do you host or copy the streams?
- No. Playback goes directly from the broadcaster's own server to your browser, and nothing passes through us. We publish the address, which is what the open community database publishes, and we never re-encode, proxy, record or store any audio.
- A station is listed here and does not want to be. What happens?
- It comes down, without an argument and without us asking for a reason. Email from an address at the station or from the contact address on the station's own site, say which page, and it is removed. There is a page written for broadcasters that sets this out, along with how to correct a listing rather than delete it.
- Why can I not play certain sports or music stations from abroad?
- Because somebody sold that broadcaster a right country by country, so the broadcaster fences the stream by territory. Their server refuses the connection. We do not try to defeat a geographic block, and the player tells you the station is not answering rather than inventing a reason.
Nothing to pay, nothing to sign
Live streams straight from the broadcasters' own servers, free in this browser and free on Chrome.
This station would not play in your browser.