Work · SR–W02 · Flagship study

Spinn Radio

Radio is not a content grid. It is geography, and it is live.

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Catalog

SR–W02 · Flagship study

Role

Designed and built by Shaji Rizvi · affiliated DLM venture

Period

2026 — ongoing

Ships as

Web PWA · Android · iOS

Spinn Radio globe discovery interface on iPad — live station clusters over the planet — Fig. 01–02 · Globe discovery — iPad and iPhoneInterface stills from the live product

Spinn Radio globe on iPhone — the same planet in the pocket — Fig. 01–02 · Globe discovery — iPad and iPhoneInterface stills from the live product

The idea

Streaming turned music into a grid: rows of artwork, ranked by an algorithm, the same in every country. Radio was never that. A station is a place — a city’s weather, language and taste coming out of a speaker in real time — and the pleasure of the dial was drifting somewhere you didn’t plan to go.

Spinn Radio asks what world radio looks like if those two properties — geography and liveness — are the entire interface. Not a directory with a map attached: a globe you turn, where every point of light is someone broadcasting right now.

What the studio designed and built

The globe

Discovery begins on the planet itself. Stations sit where their cities sit, and turning the earth is the browsing gesture — Lagos is next to its neighbors, not filed under L. The catalog underneath is the community-run Radio Browser directory: sixty thousand-plus stations across 240-plus countries and territories at last check, kept by listeners worldwide rather than owned by any one platform.

The glow

A playing station makes the globe answer. A live analyser reads the actual broadcast signal and drives the station's glow in real time — the light on the map is the sound, not an animation running beside it. Nothing pulses unless something is genuinely on air.

The cards

Long listening needs company, not interruption. An orchestration system schedules thirty distinct ambient cards — weather where the station lives, station insight, artist notes, world clocks, ticker crawls — with cooldowns and priorities, so the surface stays alive at the unhurried pace of radio itself.

The signal path

Live metadata is the hardest small problem in radio. The studio wrote its own streaming ICY parser to pull now-playing titles out of raw broadcast streams, and put a pre-warming proxy in front of playback that opens the connection before you ask — so pressing play on a station across the world feels like turning a dial, not loading a page.

The index

On top of the open directory, the studio built its own scored index of roughly thirty thousand stations — probed, ranked and tiered for stream health — so what surfaces first is what will actually play.

Spinn Radio explore view on iPad — curated station collections — Fig. 03 · Explore — iPad

Spinn Radio genre browsing on iPhone — Fig. 04 · Genres — iPhone

Outcome

Spinn Radio is a live, shipping product — a web app installable as a PWA, an Android app and an iOS app, all carrying the same globe. The catalog it surfaces belongs to the commons; the way it listens is the studio’s own. It remains in active development, and this study will grow with it.

Visit Spinn Radio

Next — SR–W03

The Music Intelligence Workshop