The eighties are the most heavily programmed decade in internet radio, and the stations covering them split into camps that barely overlap. Synth-pop and new wave stations play the British and European side: drum machines, sequencers, and production built around then-new digital instruments. Hairband and glam metal stations play the American hard rock the same decade produced, which shares a timeline and nothing else. Chart-oriented eighties stations cover both plus the soul, funk and pop that sold alongside them.
The decade also marks the transition from analogue to digital recording, which shows up audibly. Early-eighties records were cut to tape and mastered for vinyl; late-eighties records were often recorded digitally and mastered for CD. On a stream that moves between 1981 and 1989 the change in the top end is noticeable.
A practical note: eighties production, with its gated reverb and bright top end, is unusually revealing of low-bitrate encoding. The reverb tail on a gated snare is the exact kind of decaying noise that cheap encoders truncate, which is why some eighties streams sound oddly clipped.
