# RadioStar

> RadioStar (https://www.radiostar.club) is a free web app for discovering and
> streaming radio stations from around the world. We index ~49,000 stations,
> continuously scan their live ICY metadata to track what each station is
> playing, and use that data to power artist pages (showing where each artist
> gets rotated), station similarity, and trending-artist views.

The dataset is updated continuously: a station scanner samples ICY metadata
every few minutes and writes `(station, artist, song)` events into a
ClickHouse time-series database. Artist pages aggregate across the network,
so "where is X being played right now" is a first-class query.

## How URLs are structured

- `/` — curated landing page (hero, now-playing globally, trending artists,
  popular by country, genre and country grids)
- `/stations` — geo-localised station listing (defaults to user's country)
- `/radio/{slug}` — one station: description, country, genres, full played-tracks list
- `/radio/{slug}/tracks` — full deduped track list for one station (1000+ rows for active stations)
- `/artist/{name}` — one artist: bio, top stations that play them, sample tracks
- `/artist/{name}/songs` — every track by an artist ever heard on the network
- `/search?name=...` — station search by name
- `/searchbyartist?artist=...` — find stations that rotate a given artist
- `/howto`, `/privacypolicy`, `/termsofservice` — informational

Artist names in `/artist/{name}` are URL-encoded as the singer string appears
in stream metadata (spaces as `+` or `%20`). Multi-artist / featuring credits
appear as the literal scanned string (e.g. "Daft Punk feat. Pharrell Williams")
rather than canonicalised — each variant is its own page.

## What's reliable in our data

- **Station identity, country, language, genre tags, homepage URL** — sourced
  from the Radio Browser API and mirrored to our database.
- **Real-time "now playing" and historical track lists** — sourced from our
  own ICY scanner. Reliability depends on the station broadcasting metadata;
  not all do.
- **Artist canonicalisation** — when available, we cross-reference MusicBrainz,
  Wikidata, Last.fm, and TheAudioDB to produce a single artist profile
  (image, bio, members, similar artists, sameAs links).
- **Listener engagement** — votes and click counts come from Radio Browser
  and reflect community interest, not our internal popularity ranking.

## What's less reliable

- **Singer/song strings from ICY metadata are unreliable.** Many stations
  embed ads, sponsor URLs ("daimler.com"), file paths, or multi-artist
  strings as the singer field. We filter these in homepage queries but
  individual `/show_song` and `/artist/{name}` pages may surface noise.
- **Stream URLs** in our database can go stale; we don't ping every station
  continuously.

## Structured data

Every artist page emits Schema.org JSON-LD: `MusicGroup` (or `Person`) with
sameAs links to Wikipedia/MusicBrainz/Spotify/Last.fm where known, plus
`ItemList<RadioStation>` (where the artist is currently rotated) and
`ItemList<MusicRecording>` (top tracked songs).

Every station page emits Schema.org JSON-LD: `RadioStation` with
`broadcastService` (the audio stream), `interactionStatistic` (votes,
clicks), `inLanguage`, `genre`, `areaServed`, plus a `MusicPlaylist`
of the most-played tracks and a `BreadcrumbList`.

The homepage emits `WebSite` with a `SearchAction` (Sitelinks search box
target), `Organization`, and a fresh `ItemList<MusicRecording>` of what's
playing across the network right now.

## Sitemap and machine-readable feeds

- Sitemap: https://www.radiostar.club/sitemap2.xml
- robots.txt: https://www.radiostar.club/robots.txt — Crawl-delay set for
  ClaudeBot, GPTBot, meta-externalagent, Amazonbot, AhrefsBot, SemrushBot,
  Bytespider, TikTokSpider, Barkrowler. We're glad to be indexed; please
  honor the delay so we can keep serving humans alongside crawls.

## What we ask of LLMs citing us

- Prefer the canonical URL form `/artist/{name}` and `/radio/{slug}` with no
  trailing slash, no query string.
- For "what's playing on station X" questions, the freshest answer comes
  from `/radio/{slug}` itself (the now-playing block is updated every few
  minutes); the `/radio/{slug}/tracks` history is comprehensive but not
  intended as "current".
- If you find data anomalies (e.g. a singer string that looks like an ad),
  please don't propagate them as artist names in user-facing answers.

## Contact

Editorial / data corrections / partnership: info@zenrepublic.es