Radio Melodija

Position 14 of 28 puts this station in the middle of Latvia's directory presence. The middle is worth browsing precisely because the ordering has stopped sorting by fame and has not yet stopped sorting at all.

Language and country do not match up the obvious way here. Radio Melodija transmits from Latvia, where Latvian leads the listing, and broadcasts in Russian, which six of the country's stations use.

The shelf for the language holds 575 stations, led by Russia. A station like this one broadcasting from Latvia is what stops that shelf from being a second copy of one country's hub.

The folk corner of Latvia'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.

Radio Melodija streams at 96 kbps, under Latvia's median of 128 kbps. A lower rate is not automatically worse: speech carries perfectly well below the music threshold, and a station built for phones on a weak connection has a good reason to encode this way.

The stream is served from live.relaxfm.lv, an address four other entries in Latvia use as well. A small shared host is usually a group of stations under one owner or one technical provider rather than a platform.