Izwi LoMzansi

Out of 100 entries in South Africa, this one ranks 18. The upper quarter of a national list is an interesting place to be: well known enough to have accumulated opens, not so well known that it is the station everybody already had.

Izwi LoMzansi is the only station in South Africa whose first tag is african music, out of 100 with pages here. Tags come from the broadcasters themselves, so this says the station describes itself in a way no other entry in South Africa does, which is a narrower and more honest claim than saying it is the country's only african music station.

Across every country, Izwi LoMzansi is 9 of the 41 stations leading with african music, by the same open count the country list uses.

The stream is served as an HLS playlist, which is the format broadcasters use to switch bitrates on the fly and the one a plain browser audio element will not open. Nothing is wrong with the station; the player on this page simply cannot follow that kind of link without a library. The extension carries one and handles it.

The stream is served from streaming.fabrik.fm, an address six other entries in South Africa use as well. A small shared host is usually a group of stations under one owner or one technical provider rather than a platform.

Of everything the directory lists in South Africa, the entry this page reads closest to is Heart FM, so it is worth setting out what separates the two. This entry records KwaZulu-Natal as the region it transmits from, and the other records no region at all. The broadcaster tagged this entry african music, community radio, folk and kwaito, which the other entry is not tagged with. The broadcasters publish at different addresses of their own, izwi98fm.co.za and heartfm.co.za.