If you yearn to travel and experience the sounds of the world, I have a suggestion that won’t cost you a cent.
Radio Garden is a free and quite magical website that allows you to explore live radio from around the globe.
https://radio.garden/visit/yola/7YkjrM8h
And then I leisurely moved the green circle across countries and continents until I returned to Sydney and landed on Net FM who were playing, poignantly, Those Were the Days by Mary Hopkin.
Radio Garden was created in Amsterdam in 2016 and has built to a collection of over forty thousand stations. It was commissioned in the context of an exhibition at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision for the research project Transnational Radio Encounters and is now available on an app with now both a subscription and free version.
Not only can you just randomly scan the globe but there is also a Browse section for more curated content and playlists allowing for truly diverse musical discoveries.
But first, I encourage you to go digging in the Radio Garden and see where you end up, and what you discover.
Jen Seyderhelm is a writer, editor and podcaster for Radioinfo.