32 in Minneapolis | 83 in Dakar
what i learned from listening to things in faraway places
32 degrees, cloudy, late March, Monday afternoon in Minneapolis.
I wanted to feel hope, and I didn’t want an algorithm to guess what that meant.
So instead of filtering my library to “Relaxing” or surrendering to some Spotify station, I opened radio.garden and started looking for somewhere warm.
Radio.garden is essentially a 3D map of the earth covered in green dots, each one a city with its top radio stations. You click a dot, you’re there. No queue, no recommendations, no smart shuffle.
Just a place, its frequencies, and a group of strangers listening together, separately.
Dakar had everything I was looking for that Monday.
Songs I’d never heard, in languages I don’t speak, consistently blowing my mind.
My room suddenly warmer. My hips infinitely looser.
If a song grabbed me I’d navigate to that station’s website to try to find it. Leading me to see local news headlines, community programs, dispatches from a city I’ve never visited, and information I likely wouldn’t have ever seen otherwise.
One tab became three. Three became an hour.
This is what convenience has quietly been costing us.
Spotify is a miracle of access. I can have fourteen years of library-building on my phone at 40,000 feet. I can hijack my friend’s Spotify jam while they’re driving. I’m not arguing against unlimited access.
But somewhere in all the frictionless systems we’ve built and pay for monthly, the artist became a byproduct, and the art a commodity.
There are songs I genuinely love in my library where I couldn’t tell you the artist’s name, the origin, or what the project was even about.
For the longest time there was always a receipt.
Even in the era of iTunes you still had to say
“Yes, Mr. Sean. I Am Down. And I am willing to give you $1.29 to listen to Down for the rest of my life.”
The receipt meant something.
Radio.garden gives a different kind of receipt. Not a transaction, but a place, a shared moment — sounds other people were hearing simultaneously on the other side of the planet.
We're deep in an era where the tools promising the least friction are quietly flattening everything else (for only $12.99/month).
I’m not asserting radio is any more of a representative cultural experience than Spotify. But it felt human in a way I hadn’t expected. Less like a library and more like an open window onto a street I’ve never walked down.
I may never get to travel to Senegal, but I do feel enriched having thought about the people listening with me today.
Sometimes the detour is the point. And after years of streaming music, I’m looking for more detours.