City HipHop RaB

In Bulgaria's listing City HipHop RaB lands at 18 of 71, which puts it on the first or second page of the country hub rather than in its tail.

The hiphop r&b corner of Bulgaria's dial is two stations deep in this snapshot. Small clusters like that are usually the most rewarding thing on a country page, because they are what the national broadcasters at the top of the list are not.

The gap here is large: 48 kbps where Bulgaria's stations typically run 128. 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.

AAC here, on a dial that carries four different formats. A mixed codec listing usually means a country whose stations are hosted in several different places rather than through one dominant provider.

The stream address on this entry points at play.global.audio, which is where 11 other stations in Bulgaria are served from as well. Platforms of that size carry the long tail of a country's dial, and they are the reason a listing can look broken when it is one host having a quiet hour.

The broadcaster publishes at radioplay.bg, on Bulgaria's own country domain. A national domain is a small piece of evidence that the station is what the directory says it is, since these are the harder ones to register from somewhere else.