International Rare Groove

Position 270 of 466 puts this station in the middle of the United Kingdom'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.

The afrobeat corner of the United Kingdom's dial is three 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.

At 64 kbps this is one of the lowest rate streams on the United Kingdom's dial, whose median is 128 kbps. It will hold a connection almost anywhere, which is the tradeoff being made.

Where the United Kingdom's stations mostly use MP3, this one uses AAC. Worth a line only because it is a difference, and because the country page's format breakdown is one of the quicker ways to see which providers a national dial runs on.

The stream is served from s131.radiolize.com, which no other entry in the United Kingdom uses in this snapshot. Nothing else in the listing shares its fate: if this address stops answering it is this broadcaster's own outage, and if it plays, it plays.