Fourth Street Radio

This one will be short and sweet, you'll see why soon...

Again, another station picked out of the thousands cos it's name lept out at me while scrolling through on my Wi-Fi radio. In my effort to avoid commercial stations I try to skip anything with FM or a frequency number anywhere near it.

Fourth St radio was tucked away in the RnB genre, but I wanted a bit of a change and even though it's not a style I'm immediately drawn to, I like to give these things a go. I guess this was part of the problem, as a genre I've only dipped into, I thought this would strech my musical tastes. All I really got was RnB pop from the last 20 years, some I'd heard before, but most I hadn't. I get the feeling the reason the unknown track hadn't been heard was less to do with there niche value and more to do with them being not vey good.
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And here's where the review comes to a screaching halt. Despite advertising there site on there shows, I can find no online presence for them. Someone also needs to have a word about domain names, I mean if you're going to have a domain name primarily read out to people, why choose one which has at least four legitimate ways of spelling it (fourth, 4th, Street & St). Anyway I couldn't find a website under any combination and google gave me no hint either.

So for fairly drab lack lustre music and no site at all, Fourth Street Radio gets a big fat DROP-IT rating.

0180's Lost Dance Treasures

This one popped up on my 'You might like this' list on Reciva, the site that supplies all the listings to my wifi radio. I'm not a huge fan of the site, it's exceptionally slow and really doesn't make finding a good online radio station that much easier, but I thought I'd give there recomendations a go.

0180s.com has a collection of channels, each with a slight different 80's theme from Dancefloor to Power Rock Ballards they cover a range of styles and tastes. As I was recommended Lost Dance Treasures, it was here I started.


I'll come straight out with it, I'm not a fan, neither was anyone within listening distance, in some cases, the lost need to stay lost... The music,as you'd expect from the station logo, is heavily 80's orientated, so at times there was a pleasant tingle of nostalgia. Unfortunately the tracks chosen more often led to a shudder of the 'I'd forgotten how bad that was' variety. I'm also not 100% sure they've got their themes right, from some soft rock to the Petshop Boys to Aciiiiiid to The B52's Rock Lobster. The consistency / flow of the music didn't really get going.

This leads me to possibly the biggest problem, in between EVERY track there's a 10-20 second pause. No station ID, just dead air. I guess it could be just scarily regular connection problems but it makes hard listening to whatever the reason.

0180s.com's website is very simple, it provides access to it's stations, it's sister sites (like 0170s.com, 01Jazz.com & 01Urban.com to name a few) and copious amounts of advertising. The nearest we get to some kind of extended service is a link to buy tracks heard on the radio.


Overall Lost Dance Treasures gets a DROP-IT rating for poor music, poor connections and a poor website. I originally gave this the next rating up, on the grounds that 80's music is popular, but I can't believe there's not a better 80's station out there, possibly one of 0180s.com's other channels...