What Radio Station Plays Alternative Music – A Discussion
Posted by Mike Schumacher
This article will discuss what radio station plays alternative music, including ‘rock’, ‘indie’, ‘funk’, and ‘electro’. If you know the name of your local ‘alternative’ station or simply your region, this information is useful.
We also look at your unique listening behavior, which enables us to recommend music you’ll enjoy.
By using some simple web analysis tools and a few known web services, we can see what radio stations play popular music in your local area.
Often it’s straightforward to see this using the free music viewer provided by “tweetdeck”. If you’re in the UK, we recommend using something similar called “tweetbank”.
For many other countries around the world, you may need to use a reverse image search to see the picture of the station identification plaque at the top of the station’s building.
The information above is essentially as open as it can get, and you can explore it further to learn about your personal musical interests and the musical tastes of others in the general public.
In fact, it’s much easier to get your favorite radio stations than to get something to listen to. The traditional method is to go to the radio station website, look for a particular song, artist, or genre of music and buy a CD or download it to your computer or digital player.
But people don’t always have the time or cash to do that, or the money to buy CDs, or perhaps the interest. Enter: the internet.
We can now all have the radio stations that are tuned to us.
Music listening is less time consuming than buying music, easier than driving to a store, and can be better quality than many radio stations offer. There are hundreds of online radio stations to choose from, all playing different music styles.
However, even the best-known stations may play a song you don’t like, a popular song you may be familiar with, a song you may have heard many times before, or a song that was popular at some point but isn’t now.
What is social listening
Social listening is another part of the modern music experience where you’re going to be able to discover music that you like through other people’s listening habits.
In many cases, a lot of it is linked to services that you’re already familiar with, like Spotify or Pandora or your favorite streaming services like TuneIn and YouTube.
If you’re not sure which services you’re using, use the social listening web and mobile apps to find out, or check out what a friend recently shared on Facebook.
Social listening apps can help you identify new songs and artists, listen to entire playlists that your friends or family share, and more. But, more importantly, they can help you to get what you want from the music that you do hear.
If you’re really using social listening, you probably already know some of this, or can look it up. For instance, maybe you regularly follow a ‘hip-hop’ channel and want to figure out when that genre is popular.
Or maybe you follow a music blog that plays a lot of alternative rock and you want to find out what songs they were listening to the week of a particular concert.
In short, social listening is a lot like any other form of personal or professional analysis, but is delivered in an entirely new way. It involves:
- Analyzing what you hear in social media streams
- Using your music player to identify new songs and artists you might like
- Using web tools to find out about people and events that are relevant to you
- Using a specialized app to customize your listening experience to what you want to hear
Social listening and analytics are important for most music fans. After all, not everyone is going to be following a Facebook page or following a Twitter feed in order to get the most from their experience.
To identify artists and songs you might like and make sure that you’re hearing them, you’re going to want to use some kind of software to help you with your listening, and most people will use something from Spotify, iTunes, or Pandora.
These are just a few ways to identify music in your social environment and to identify the music that’s relevant to you.
If you’re a social media and marketing professional, these methods of listening can be applied to a wide variety of interests, products, events, and organizations
For example, the rise of social media allows more granular reporting on who is sharing which content, how many people are listening to which songs, and how many times a certain track has been played.
Social listening is an important part of how people discover new music. Most of it is not secret, and almost everyone you know uses some type of service like Spotify or Pandora or has shared a song or video to Facebook, or maybe Instagram.
So, it’s a fact that we can get great insight into the music scene and we can learn a lot about our friends’ listening habits in a way that we haven’t been able to do in the past.
If you’re wondering how that could be important, here are some examples of how it can help you.
If your friends are into hip-hop, social listening could help you figure out what music they’re listening to and what music you should be listening to, as well.
It could also let you find new music in your own genre, like if your friends aren’t listening to jazz yet but you want to explore jazz.
Social listening can help you figure out which new music you should be listening to. Some of the things to listen for are:
- Your friend or family member recently listened to an album or a song
- Someone your friend follows is playing a lot of that artist’s songs on their feed
- A few people who you know listen to a lot of the artist are posting about it on social media
- A lot of people are commenting about the new music
Social listening can also help you learn more about an artist or band you know. Sometimes this happens when someone shares an album to their wall and it gets a ton of attention and discussion.
Or maybe the song just popped up on a playlist you created or someone shared it.
There are a lot of things to listen for and we’ll try to lay out some ways to do that in this section. But it’s important to keep in mind that social listening can be a little off-putting for some people.

The Jam Addict team is a revolving door of writers who care about music, its effects on culture, and giving aspiring artists tools and knowledge to be inspired and keep on creating.
If you have any questions or concerns or just want to drop us a line, don’t hesitate to contact us! We always appreciate the feedback.