Live FM

In Bahrain's listing Live FM lands at 4 of 5, which puts it on the first or second page of the country hub rather than in its tail.

A word on the ordering, because it is doing less work here than it looks. Bahrain's most opened station in this snapshot has only four recorded opens, so the ranking across the whole country is separating stations by a handful of clicks. Read Bahrain's list as a shelf rather than as a chart.

A English station transmitting from Bahrain is a rarity in this data: one of the country's entries carry that language, against a listing whose commonest is Arabic. Combinations like this are the reason the site indexes language separately from country.

Where else English is on air, according to the same snapshot: mostly United States, United Arab Emirates and United Kingdom. The shelf lists all 5,984 of them together, which is the view a country hub cannot give.

The gap here is large: 320 kbps where Bahrain's stations typically run 1066. Rates at this level were designed for dial-up and for mobile data that was billed by the megabyte, and plenty of stations simply never changed the setting.

Its audio comes straight from stream.aiir.com, an address unique to this entry in Bahrain's listing. That is the simplest case there is, and it is the one where pressing play tells you the whole truth about whether the station is on air.