Radio-Browser is a community “wiki” that collects and maintains a list of online radio stations. Other than being a web application, it also serves as the database for various open-source internet radio applications.
As a user of both the website and the accompanying applications, I have both added and maintained stations there before. After some time I started wondering what it would take to get my own internet radio up there. Obviously, with it being a community wiki, it is not difficult to add a station there. The difficult part is getting anyone to listen to it.
Usually, the stations in the Top Voted list get a good number of listeners, and the way to get into that list is to get lots of votes from listeners.
Before I got myself on that list I needed my own internet radio. I wrote a custom server in Python, which I might write about in another blog post.
The website does not have authentication for voting. Instead, it relies on unique IP addresses in a given time-frame to limit votes. This gives us two methods of increasing our votes.
- Regularly vote from our PC / server, perhaps with a cron job
- Get a proxy list and loop through it
- Put the vote endpoint as an
<img>tag on my homepage
Of course the most effective and fun way is the third one. All you need to do is get the ID of the station and put it on any website like
<img src="https://www.radio-browser.info/webservice/json/vote/41976" style="display:none;" />
Replace 41976 with the ID of your station and every time someone (even some web crawlers) visits your website, they will inadvertently vote for your station.