Shuffling Random Internet Radio Stations with Radio Garden's Balloon Ride Radio

Radio Garden is pret-ty neat. I found out about it from my musician aunt some years ago...it's got a globe filled with little dots, each representing an internet radio station, so you can hear music from all around the world (though I find it can be remarkably homogenous a lot of times). But my favorite part is the Balloon Ride Radio feature, which takes you to a random station and is also like a little geo-guesser game. You can't quite spam the shuffle button the way it's designed, but this is the easiest way I've found to put on something that's basically totally random.

And it's free to use. From their privacy policy it looks like they use Google for advertising and analytics but don't appear to sell your data...and their roots at least don't seem for-profit:

Radio Garden started out in 2016 as a project by Jonathan Puckey & Moniker. It was commissioned in the context of an exhibition at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision for the research project Transnational Radio Encounters.

Since 2019, Radio Garden has been operated by Jonathan Puckey as an independent company, alongside an enthusiastic team of gardeners.

And there's a bunch more artsy and social-experiment type stuff at puckey.studio.

They have had a premium plan since 2023 that let's you get out of visual ads and use their sleep timer, and it looks like you can share with your family (not super clear but "Family Sharing" is a bullet point).

As usual, I'm not an affiliate or anything, I just like using Radio Garden a lot. In fact, I will say you can use Radio Garden as a progressive web app on your mobile device to easily block tracking and ads with your browser (Safari with the free uBlock Origin Lite extension on iOS, Android probably has more options). You can't save your favorite stations if you do - no account needed to do that in the app store app versions by the way - but if you just want to listen/shuffle it works great.