Why "popular" on Vibique means what people are playing today

Open most internet radio directories and the biggest genres sit at the top: pop, news, talk. That's because they rank by size. There are thousands of pop stations, so pop must be popular. But a genre with a thousand stations nobody listens to isn't popular. It's just big.

Vibique separates the two. Size is how many stations a genre, country or language has. Popularity is what people are actually playing today.

Every day, Vibique looks at the 500 stations with the most plays in the last 24 hours across the whole Radio Browser directory. We call that the pulse. When a genre page says "96 stations in today's top 500", that's the pulse talking.

Popular Stations on the home page, the order of genres in Explore, and "Most played today" on every genre and country page all come from it. So when Jazz ranks above a genre with three times as many stations, it's because more people are listening.

Trending Now shows stations drawing more listeners than usual. Radio Browser doesn't keep yesterday's numbers for most stations, so we compare today's plays with a station's long-term votes: a small station suddenly getting attention rises, even if it will never be in the top 500.

Ranking by size buries the stations people love under the ones that simply exist. Ranking by listening means the first thing you see is what the world is tuned to right now, which is a better place to start exploring.