Country music is American, but it has never stayed at home. The records travelled with American soldiers and on American radio, and the music took root wherever working people liked a story and a steel guitar. Our directory now lists 928 stations from 52 countries. Here is what the map looks like.
The United States: 445 stations
Nearly half of the directory is American, as you would expect. The states with the most stations are Tennessee and Texas, with 23 and 22, then North Carolina, Virginia and Wisconsin. Between them they cover everything: Nashville institutions like WSM, classic country stations in small towns, the Texas circuit, and internet stations devoted to a single style, from western swing to bluegrass gospel.
Browse them all on our United States page.
Canada: 134 stations
Canada is the second-biggest country radio nation in our directory by a long way, with 134 stations. Ontario has the most, 29, but the three Prairie provinces together have 54 — Alberta alone has a whole network of "Real Country" stations in small towns.
Canadian commercial radio has to devote a share of its music to Canadian content, which has helped a strong home-grown country scene. It is a country that gave the world Hank Snow, Anne Murray and Shania Twain, whose Come On Over is one of the best-selling albums of all time.
Australia: 72 stations
Australia has a country music tradition almost as old as America's, and its own heroes. Slim Dusty's "A Pub with No Beer", in 1957, was a hit around the world. The Tamworth Country Music Festival, held every January in New South Wales since 1973, is one of the biggest music festivals in the southern hemisphere.
It also produced the artist who tops our own airplay chart: Keith Urban, born in New Zealand and raised in Queensland, who started out playing Australian country before moving to Nashville. In our first thirty hours of logging he was heard on 124 stations, level with Kenny Chesney and Blake Shelton at the top.
Germany: 57 stations
Germany has had a large country scene since the 1970s, partly thanks to the American forces radio that played across the country for decades. The Hamburg band Truck Stop had a big German hit in 1977 with a song whose title translates as "I'd so like to hear Dave Dudley" — a tribute to the American trucking singer. Today there are country festivals, line-dancing clubs and dozens of internet stations, many of them playing a mix of American hits and European country.
The Netherlands, the UK and Scandinavia
The Netherlands has 22 stations in our directory, the United Kingdom 20 and Sweden 10. Britain's country audience has grown fast in the streaming era; the C2C festival has filled London's O2 arena every March since 2013. There are country stations in Ireland, where a homegrown mix of country and Irish music has been popular for generations, and in Switzerland, France and across Scandinavia.
Brazil: sertanejo
Brazil's 12 stations point to a different kind of country music altogether. Sertanejo — named after the sertão, the country's rural backlands — began as the folk music of the Brazilian countryside and grew into one of the most popular genres in the country, dominated by singing duos. It is not American country, but it shares its roots in rural life, and some stations in Brazil tag it as country. Bruno & Marrone, one of the best-known sertanejo duos, turn up on the Brazilian stations in our directory.
A warning about the map
Not every station tagged "country" is what it seems. In Morocco and the United Arab Emirates, for instance, there are stations in the open database we use that tag themselves "country" — apparently meaning the nation, not the music — while broadcasting news, talk and Arabic pop. We keep them listed, because the database does, but our listings rank them below the stations we are sure about. (Most of the UAE's 26 stations are something else again: an internet network whose "Exclusively" stations each play a single artist, from the Eagles to Dolly Parton.) If you spot a station that plainly is not country, tell us.
Find your own
Browse the directory by country, or turn the dial and see where it lands. If a country station near you is missing, tell us about it.