Alex

Alex sits in the tail of Russia's 471 entries. The tail is the part of a directory that goes missing first, and it is the part worth keeping: the head of every country's list is the same handful of national broadcasters, and everything that makes a dial local is behind them.

With one recorded open, Alex sits in the part of the directory where the numbers stop discriminating. The station's position in Russia's list should be read as approximate for exactly that reason.

The station's leading tag is drum & bass, shared with 3 other entries in Russia. It is a well populated tag here without being one of the country's defining ones, which is a common and unremarkable place for a station to sit.

At 320 kbps, Alex streams at more than double Russia's median of 128 kbps. That is a deliberate choice by whoever runs it: bandwidth is the recurring cost of an internet station, and a rate this far above the local norm is money spent on sounding better than the dial around it.

Its audio comes from myradio24.org. Four other stations in Russia stream from the same host, which is a smaller sharing than the big platforms and often means the same people run them all.