Characterizing Internet Radio Stations at Scale Gustavo R. Lacerda Silva Lucas Machado de Oliveira Rafael Ribeiro de Medeiros Electrical Engineering Department Computer Science Department Computer Science Department Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais Belo Horizonte, Brazil Belo Horizonte, Brazil Belo Horizonte, Brazil
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Olga Goussevskaia Fabrício Benevenuto Computer Science Department Computer Science Department Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais Belo Horizonte, Brazil Belo Horizonte, Brazil
[email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT but also helped the emergence of several independent radio sta- In this paper we build and characterize a large-scale dataset of tions [25]. 1 internet radio streams. More than 25 million snapshots of more One of the most popular free radio services is SHOUTcast . Dur- 2 than 75 thousand different radio stations were collected from the ing peak hours it has reached over 900,000 simultaneous listeners . SHOUTcast service between December 2016 and April 2017. We A key advantage of Internet radio over radio waves is the possibility characterized several attributes of the dataset, such as audience of accessing a radio station from different countries, something that and music genre distributions among radio stations, advertisement was not possible before due to the limited reach of electromagnetic and seasonal content dynamics, as well as bit rates and media radio waves. Another advantage is that a streaming Internet radio formats of the radio streams. Finally, we analyzed to which extent station is cheap to set up [25].