The United States has more licensed radio stations than any other country and the largest share of this directory. That abundance comes with a caveat worth knowing before you browse: American commercial radio is heavily consolidated, so a "local" station in one market is frequently running the same syndicated programming as a station two thousand miles away, under a different set of call letters.
The genuinely local material is in three places. College and community stations, usually on the lower end of the FM band, programme independently and are where most of the interesting American radio now lives. Public radio carries the news, documentary and classical programming that commercial stations dropped. And sports and news-talk stations are local by necessity, because a syndicated show cannot cover a city's own teams and politics.
American stations are identified by call sign, a four-letter code that also tells you roughly where the station is. Stations west of the Mississippi generally start with K and those east of it with W, a convention dating to the 1920s with a handful of grandfathered exceptions. It is a quick way to place a station before you read anything else about it.
Technically, American stations in this directory are increasingly using AAC and AAC+ rather than MP3, which means lower bitrate numbers for the same perceived quality. A US station advertising 48 kbps AAC+ is not a poor stream; it is a mobile-optimised one costing around 21 MB an hour.
