A Radiooooo illustration with a woman with red hair and blue skin.
Courtesy Radiooooo

Avoid Algorithms With the Incredibly Refreshing Radiooooo

By Aileen Kwun
May 30, 2020
2 minute read

In an era where music streaming algorithms and data-driven suggestions can throw you for a loop, somehow leading you to listen to the same five songs on repeat, it can feel like we’ve swapped serendipitous discovery for convenience. Artist Benjamin Moreau and his friend Raphaël Hamburger, a music producer with a sizable record collection, started Radiooooo—spelled with, count ’em, five O’s—around the idea of creating a crowdsourced time machine of music. While popular platforms like Spotify and Pandora allow you to browse songs by genre or title, Radiooooo shares a set of staff-curated playlists that are instead organized by decade and geography: two factors that open up a whole new way of exploring music digitally. And the visual interface, navigated by clicking different countries on a world map, and choosing any decade from 1900 to the present, takes on the air of an old-timey jukebox. Each of the songs has been uploaded by a worldwide network of more than 30,000 music nerds and obsessives, many who’ve digitized rare or hard-to-find vinyl treasures and deep cuts that you’d be hard-pressed to stumble across elsewhere, online or off. (If you’d like to go even deeper into internet radioland, we also recommend Radio Garden, which lets you tune into more than 8,000 radio stations from all over the world, each plotted onto a Google Earth–like interface.) Until the days of crate-digging at our favorite record stores return, we’re finding a satisfying standby in these transporting tunes.