How to Add a Station to Radio Garden
Radio Garden is one of the most distinctive radio platforms on the internet - a spinning 3D globe covered in green dots, each one representing a city or town where at least one live radio station is broadcasting right now. With over 40,000 stations indexed and more than 10 million people using the platform every month, getting your station listed there is one of the most cost-effective distribution decisions a broadcaster can make. The service is free. The submission form is publicly available. And once you are on the globe, your station is discoverable by listeners in every country on earth.
The catch - because there always is one - is that Radio Garden's editorial team checks every submission manually before approving it. This is not a self-serve directory where any stream URL gets published instantly. The editors verify that your station's website is real, your stream actually works, and your setup meets a specific set of technical requirements. Understanding those requirements before you submit is what separates broadcasters who get listed within a few days from those whose submissions quietly disappear into the queue and never emerge.
What Radio Garden Actually Is - and Why Getting Listed There Matters
Radio Garden started as a research project developed from 2013 to 2016 by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, the Transnational Radio Knowledge Platform, and five European universities. Created and designed by Amsterdam-based studios Puckey and Moniker - specifically Bas Agterberg and Jonathan Puckey - the project asked a deceptively simple question: can we accurately demonstrate what radio sounds like all over the world? The answer turned out to be yes, and when the project went public in December 2016, it went viral almost immediately after being introduced at the International Broadcasting Convention in Amsterdam.
When it launched, Radio Garden provided access to nearly 8,000 stations. By 2024, that number had grown to over 40,000. The platform is owned by Radio Garden B.V., a Dutch company, and operates at radio.garden, with native iOS and Android apps that launched in 2018 and a search function added in 2019. The apps carry near-maximum ratings on both major app stores, which reflects how well the concept translates to mobile use - spinning a globe on a smartphone to find live radio from a city you are curious about is genuinely compelling in a way that a list-based radio directory never quite manages.
For a radio station, the platform offers something that most distribution channels do not: geographic serendipity. On Radio Garden, listeners do not search for your station by name - they find it by clicking on your city's dot on a globe. Someone in Tokyo spins the globe to Europe, lands on your city, and suddenly they are listening to your station for the first time. That discovery mechanism is entirely different from how listeners find stations on TuneIn or iHeartRadio, and for small and medium stations, it creates a genuinely global audience that would be nearly impossible to build through traditional means.
The Globe Interface and How Listeners Actually Discover Stations
The Radio Garden interface uses WebGL technology to render a rotatable 3D globe with satellite imagery - similar in feel to Google Earth, but populated with green dots instead of map labels. Each green dot represents a location where at least one listed station is based. Clicking or tapping on a dot brings up the available stations for that city, along with the city and country name. Listeners can then select a station and start streaming immediately within the Radio Garden interface, without being redirected to an external site.
The platform also integrates GPS location detection, which means that when a new user opens Radio Garden for the first time, the globe can automatically orient to their location and show them nearby stations. This creates a home-market discovery layer on top of the global exploration experience, making the platform useful both for people who want to find local stations and for those who want to explore radio from places they have never visited. Your station benefits from both behaviors - local listeners who might have missed you on the FM dial, and international listeners who land on your city out of curiosity.
The Submission Form - Where to Find It and What It Asks
Radio Garden maintains its station submission form at submit.radio.garden, which redirects to a Google Form hosted by the Radio Garden team. The form itself is short - it does not ask for extensive documentation or require you to create an account. What it does ask for is precise, and the precision matters.
You will need to provide your station name exactly as you want it to appear on the platform, the city and country where your station is based, the geographic coordinates of your station's location (latitude and longitude), a working stream URL, and your station website URL. You will also need to provide an email address, because that is how Radio Garden will notify you when your station has been added - by sending you a direct link to your station's page on the platform.
The form accepts minor errors in text fields, but the stream URL and coordinates need to be correct. A broken stream URL means the editors cannot verify your station works, and a wrong city coordinate means your station appears on the globe in the wrong location - which, once published, creates confusion for listeners and requires a correction request to fix. It is worth spending five minutes before you submit to confirm your stream URL plays correctly in a standard media player and to double-check your coordinates against a mapping tool.
Finding the Right Stream URL for Your Station
The stream URL is the single most important piece of information in your submission, and it is also the most common reason submissions fail or get rejected. Radio Garden needs a direct stream URL - the actual audio stream endpoint - not a link to your station's listening page, not a link to your profile on TuneIn or ShoutCast, and not a playlist file. The URL needs to resolve directly to a playable audio stream that can be accessed from anywhere in the world.
Your hosting provider or streaming service can give you this URL if you do not already have it. It typically ends in something like .mp3, .aac, or /stream, depending on your streaming setup. Test it by pasting it directly into a media player like VLC before submitting - if VLC plays your station from that URL without any additional steps, it will likely work with Radio Garden. If it requires a login, geo-restriction workaround, or browser-specific behavior to play, it will not pass the editorial review.
Technical Requirements That Radio Garden Enforces
Radio Garden's editorial team checks every submitted station against a specific set of technical and content requirements. Meeting all of these before you submit saves time for everyone and significantly increases the chance that your station appears on the globe within the standard review period. Skipping any of them is the most common reason that submissions are either rejected or simply never acknowledged.
The website associated with your station must be online and functional around the clock. A station website that goes down periodically, redirects to a social media page, or presents as a half-completed template is not going to pass review. The site needs to actually represent your station - with basic information about the station, its format, and its location - in a way that confirms to the editors that a real, operating broadcast entity is behind the submission.
The stream itself must be accessible from everywhere in the world, without geographic restrictions. This is a harder requirement than it might appear for stations that use certain commercial streaming hosts. Some streaming services implement region-locking by default, or apply restrictions that prevent access from specific countries. If your stream cannot be played from outside your home country, Radio Garden's editors - who are based in the Netherlands - may not be able to verify it at all, which effectively ends the review process for that submission.
Stream Formats That Radio Garden Does Not Accept
Not every stream format is compatible with Radio Garden's aggregation system, and submitting an incompatible stream is one of the fastest ways to get your application quietly set aside. M3U8 streams - the format commonly used for HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) delivery - are not supported. RTSP streams are not supported. ShoutCast streams running on versions 2.4 or below are not supported. If your station uses any of these formats as its primary stream, you will need to either configure an alternative stream format or contact your hosting provider about generating a compatible stream URL before submitting.
Streams hosted through Radionomy are not accepted because Radio Garden cannot guarantee they are accessible worldwide. Streams from Securenet Systems are not accepted because that service blocks Radio Garden's infrastructure from accessing the audio. These are not edge cases - both are relatively common hosting providers in the independent radio space, so it is worth checking which service your station uses before investing time in the submission process.
What the Radio Garden Editors Actually Check
Radio Garden does not publish a detailed description of its editorial process, but the requirements it enforces make the basic checklist fairly clear. The editors verify that your station's website is a real, functional web presence - not a redirect to a third-party hosting page on TuneIn, ShoutCast, or similar platforms. A TuneIn page for your station is fine as a supplementary presence, but it cannot be the primary website you submit. Radio Garden wants to see that your station has its own independent web identity.
They also verify that the stream URL you submitted actually plays. This sounds obvious, but stream URLs break, go offline for maintenance, or require specific headers to access in ways that are not apparent from looking at the URL itself. If the editors cannot play your stream when they check it, the submission will not advance regardless of how good your website looks. Submitting during a planned maintenance window is a common and easily avoidable mistake.
The geographic coordinates you provide determine where your green dot appears on the globe. The editors may cross-reference these against the city you listed to confirm they are plausible. A station claiming to be in Los Angeles but submitting coordinates that place it in rural Montana will trigger a flag. Use the actual coordinates of your city or the building where your studios are located - either is fine, and precision within a few decimal places is sufficient.
What Happens After You Submit
Once you submit the form, the review process begins on Radio Garden's end. The standard timeline is a few days to a couple of weeks, depending on the current volume of submissions the editorial team is processing. You do not need to follow up during this period - the process is not accelerated by multiple submissions of the same station, and submitting again with the same information will not help.
When your station is approved and added to the globe, Radio Garden sends an email to the address you provided in the submission form. That email includes a direct link to your station's page on the radio.garden website - the URL you can share with listeners, add to your website, and use in promotional materials. From that moment, your station is visible and playable on the globe for every Radio Garden user in the world, on both the web platform and the iOS and Android apps.
If your submission is rejected or not processed, the most likely reasons are a non-functional stream, a website that did not meet the editorial standards, or an incompatible stream format. Radio Garden may contact you by email to explain the issue, or the submission may simply not advance. If you have not heard back after several weeks and believe your station meets all the requirements, the appropriate response is to re-check your stream and website against the requirements list, make any necessary corrections, and submit again through the standard form.
Everything You Need to Prepare Before You Submit
| Item | What to Prepare | Common Mistakes |
|---|---|---|
| Station name | Exact name as it should appear on Radio Garden | Typos, inconsistency with official branding |
| City and country | The actual broadcast location, not a virtual office address | Using headquarters city instead of actual studio location |
| Geographic coordinates | Latitude and longitude of your station's city or studio | Swapping latitude and longitude; using wrong decimal format |
| Stream URL | Direct audio stream endpoint, verified in VLC or similar | Submitting a listening page URL instead of direct stream; M3U8 format |
| Station website | Your own fully functional website with station info | Submitting a TuneIn or ShoutCast profile page as the website |
| Email address | An active address you check regularly | Using a no-reply or rarely monitored address and missing the confirmation |
The Requirements Checklist Before You Click Submit
- Your station website is fully functional and online 24/7, not a half-filled template or a redirect to a third-party hosting page.
- Your stream URL is a direct audio endpoint that plays in a standard media player like VLC without any additional steps or login.
- Your stream is accessible from everywhere in the world - no geo-restrictions, no country-specific blocks.
- Your stream is NOT in M3U8 format, NOT using RTSP, and NOT running on ShoutCast version 2.4 or below.
- Your stream is NOT hosted through Radionomy or Securenet Systems, both of which are incompatible with Radio Garden.
- Your geographic coordinates are correct and correspond to the city you listed in your submission.
- You have tested the stream URL during the same time window you plan to submit, confirming it is live and playing.
Updating or Correcting a Station Already on Radio Garden
If your station is already listed on Radio Garden but has incorrect information - a wrong city placement, an outdated stream URL, a name that changed after rebranding - the process for requesting a correction goes through the same submission sheet at submit.radio.garden. The form includes options for updating existing stations, not just adding new ones. You will need to provide the current Radio Garden link to your station along with the corrected information so the editors can locate your listing and make the update.
Stream URL changes are among the most common update requests, and they are also among the most time-sensitive. If your station's stream URL changes and you do not update it on Radio Garden, your green dot remains on the globe but clicking it plays nothing - which is functionally worse than not being listed at all. Listeners who try your station and find it broken are unlikely to try again. Keeping your Radio Garden listing current is a small maintenance task with a meaningful impact on how the platform represents your station to its global audience.
The same editorial review process that applies to new submissions applies to updates, which means corrections can take a few days to process. If you are planning a technical migration that will change your stream URL, submitting the update request a few days before the change goes live gives the editors time to process it around the same time the new URL becomes active.
Radio Garden Beyond the Submission - Features Worth Knowing
Once your station is listed, understanding how Radio Garden works from the listener's perspective helps you think about your station's presence on the platform. Beyond the live globe, Radio Garden includes a History section that broadcasts audio clips from radio's past - a fascinating archive of how the medium has sounded across different eras and countries. There is a Jingles section that plays station identification jingles from around the world, and a Stories section where listeners contribute personal accounts and facts about radio and specific stations.
These sections add texture to the platform and explain part of why it has retained such a loyal global user base since its viral launch. Radio Garden is not just a stream aggregator - it is built around a genuine curiosity about radio as a cultural phenomenon, which is exactly the audience that a well-produced, interesting radio station wants discovering it on a globe on a Tuesday afternoon in a different hemisphere.
The platform also allows listeners to share direct links to specific stations, which means your Radio Garden URL can circulate on social media and in messaging apps independently of the platform's own discovery mechanism. A listener who finds your station by exploring the globe can share that exact URL with friends in other countries, who can click it and land directly on your station's Radio Garden page without ever spinning the globe themselves. This link-sharing behavior makes Radio Garden's reach multiplicative in a way that purely algorithmic discovery platforms rarely achieve.