How to Explore the World with the 72FM Radio Map

Updated 11 September 2026

The 72FM radio map lets you click any location on an interactive globe and hear what's broadcasting there. It is the alternative to searching: instead of knowing what you are looking for, you pick a country — Japan, Nigeria, Argentina, Norway — and see what is broadcasting there. From there, play any one and you're listening to local radio from that place. No search terms needed, no genre to specify. The map turns global radio discovery into something closer to wandering than searching.

What the radio map is

The radio map at 72fm.com/map is an interactive geographic view of the radio stations available through 72FM. Each station is associated with a location — typically the city or country it broadcasts from — and the map reflects those locations as pins or clusters.

It answers the question you didn't know you had: what's playing right now in Seville, or Nairobi, or Seoul? And because radio is live, the answer changes hour by hour — a morning show, an afternoon programme, an evening broadcast.

How to use it: a walkthrough

Step 1: Open the map

Go to 72fm.com/map or click the Map link in the main navigation. The map loads with a global view showing stations as pins or location clusters.

Step 2: Navigate to a region

• Click and drag to pan the map.
• Scroll to zoom in and out, or use the zoom controls.
• Click a continent or country to zoom in; individual cities and stations become visible as you go deeper.

Step 3: Explore a city or area

Zoom into an area you're curious about. As the map zooms, clusters expand into individual station pins. Each pin represents a station broadcasting from or associated with that location.

Step 4: Click a station pin

Clicking a pin brings up the station card: the station name, genre tags, and a play button. Tap play to start listening — the audio begins immediately, as it would from any station in the directory.

Step 5: Explore from there

If the station interests you, favourite it (up to 10 on the free tier, unlimited on Premium) for easy return. If it doesn't suit you, close the card and click another pin nearby. The map is forgiving — exploring is the point.

What makes the map useful that search isn't

Text search is excellent when you have something specific in mind. The map is useful for the opposite situation — when you're open to anything from a given place, and you want to hear something you wouldn't have thought to type.

Some examples of how listeners use it:

• Before or after travelling. Going to Lisbon next month? Spend an evening listening to Portuguese stations on the map first. Coming back from Japan? Find the station that captured something of the place.
• Language learning. Finding speech-format radio in a language you're studying is a map task more than a search task — you want something from the country, in the language, not a specific named station.
• Curiosity. Clicking an African city you've never heard of, or a Pacific island, or a mid-sized Eastern European city — and simply finding out what's on. The surprise is the feature.
• Finding alternatives. If you already love a city's sound — say, Parisian jazz cafés or Norwegian folk music — the map shows you adjacent stations in the same area.

Map vs. country browsing vs. genre search: when to use which

The map is the tool for geographic browsing. The other methods are better when you have a specific target.

Interesting places to explore on the map

Without making claims about specific station counts or availability, some areas are consistently rich for radio exploration:

• Western Europe: dense coverage, many languages, a variety of commercial and public broadcasting stations.
• Latin America: a wide range of genres across Spanish and Portuguese language radio, from regional folk to cumbia to news.
• West Africa: music-forward radio from Lagos, Accra, Abidjan, and Dakar, often in French or local languages.
• East and Southeast Asia: Japanese radio in particular has a diverse range, from city pop to classical to talk. Korean radio reflects both K-pop and older trot styles.
• Middle East: Arabic-language stations from Cairo, Beirut, Amman, and the Gulf states — a distinct sonic world from most Western listening habits.

The radio around the world guide covers more on what to expect from different regions.

Tips for getting more out of the map

Start with a continent, not a city. Zooming in from a continental view reveals clusters of activity that give you a sense of where radio is densest. Then narrow in.

Combine the map with collections. If you discover a city's sound through the map and like it, check the collections for any mood or location-based collections that feature that region — they may surface stations the map didn't show you.

Use listening history as a map companion. Stations played through the map appear in your history. If you found something remarkable, it'll be there even if you forgot to favourite it.

Explore at odd hours. Radio is local and live. Morning news shows, evening music programming, late-night talk — the map sounds different at different hours depending on where you're listening.

On mobile: the map works in the browser on phone and tablet. Touch to drag, pinch to zoom. Smaller screens make the pins a little tighter; zooming in more before tapping reduces accidental misses.

The map and Premium

The radio map is available to all listeners, free and Premium. Premium adds:

• Unlimited favourites — useful when you're marking stations across many countries and don't want to manage a 10-slot cap.
• Similar-stations — find stations close in sound to one you discovered on the map, without returning to search.
• Cross-device sync — favourites found on the map on your laptop are there on your phone without re-searching.

Explore Premium features if you use the map regularly.

In short

The 72FM radio map is the platform's most distinctive discovery tool — and the one most different from how music streaming services work. It invites browsing by place: pick a country, hear it. No genre filter, no recommendation algorithm, no familiarity required.

For listeners who want to understand what the rest of the world sounds like right now, the map is the fastest path. For listeners with specific destinations in mind, the country guides and genre pages add more context.

Open the map now at 72fm.com/map — pick somewhere you've never been, and press play.