naiz:irratia

In Spain's ordering this is number 159 of 487, which is the middle of the list. The stations either side of it are a better guide to what the country sounds like than the head of the list is, because the head is the same few famous streams in every country.

This is a Basque station in a country whose directory presence is led by Spanish. 13 entries in Spain broadcast in Basque, which is a small group and a coherent one, and browsing it is a different experience from browsing the country.

Basque is not large enough in this snapshot to have a shelf of its own here, so the station's only index is its country. Shelves are built from the directory's commonest broadcast languages and the line has to fall somewhere; below it, the country hub is the route.

Only two entries in Spain put basque music first. The tag is self-declared and inconsistent between countries, which is why the rail below is worth more as a way of wandering than as a filter.

At 320 kbps, naiz:irratia streams at more than double Spain'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.