RTFM.fm

RTFM.fm 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.

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

The shelf for the language holds 2,099 stations, led by Germany. A station like this one broadcasting from Russia is what stops that shelf from being a second copy of one country's hub.

Among 471 stations in Russia here, this is the only one that puts alternative rock first. The alternative rock rail below therefore leaves the country entirely, which is the more interesting direction to travel from a page like this.

At 256 kbps, RTFM.fm 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.