ABOUT RIYL
RIYL.fm is a snapshot of what’s playing on college radio stations across the country: the wide-ranging, deeply human, and often surprising taste of DJs who meticulously curate weekly playlists for their communities.
Explore the unique vibes of each station and browse the artists, tracks, and releases that defined their sounds in Spring 2026.
Enjoy digging through the stacks!
While the music industry bets on AI, fake fans, and TikTok trends, student participation in college radio has surged.
For decades, college radio has championed underground artists before they hit the mainstream. Against all odds, college radio is thriving on campuses again. Driven by algorithm fatigue, analog nostalgia, and a desire for third spaces.
The algorithm is the new Top 40 radio, playing the same tracks ad nauseam. Meanwhile, AI song generators are pumping out the equivalent of Spotify’s entire catalog (100M tracks) every two weeks. The emotional, cultural and social richness of music fandom has been flattened. It’s boring.
College radio DJs remind us that young people aren’t bored of music. They’re just bored of the shallow, virality-obsessed way it’s sold to them.
Why let a robot tell you what to listen to? A DJ selecting a song to play on air is 100x more meaningful than autoplay ever will be.
RIYL.fm is a project from a small team building for the next generation of music tastemakers.
Emily White is a music product builder, obsessive playlist maker and former college radio DJ, music director and general manager (WVAU, class of ’13). She writes emwhitenoise, a newsletter about music fandom and discovery. College radio literally changed the trajectory of her life. One of her proudest moments was conspiring with four DMV college radio stations to book Deerhunter at Sixth & I. She’s since seen Deerhunter 9 times (and Atlas Sound twice).
Rie McGwier is an insights architect and data geek who loves to get s*** done, no matter how big or small the task. Their favorite focus music includes Explosions in the Sky, MONO, Meute and the Umbrella Academy original series soundtrack. When cleaning the house is in order, it’s all hands on deck for ABBA Gold. They’ve seen Hop Along, the Screaming Females, and Laura Stevenson more times than one could possibly count. Github | Instagram
Carrie Walters is an art director, brand designer, and occasional photographer. She likes raving and moshing equally; she has seen Four Tet 13 times and faithfully sees Osees every Labor Day weekend. She has had a Brat summer, a Turnstile summer, and is optimistic about summers still unknown. She believes every great playlist should include at least one dramatic left turn that annoys your friends.
This Spring 2026 recap is presented by Spinitron, the playlist-management system used by many non-commercial community and educational radio stations in the country, and the source of the underlying spin data.
Spinitron caters to college, community, and educational stations where DJs spin the tunes according to independent aesthetic policies. Thousands of these stations across the country provide the alternative to the narrowly-defined music repertoire that commercial stations are forced to present.
Spinitron handles flexible playlist entry, archiving, reporting, and publishing for hundreds of non-commercial stations, and it’s also a large public spin database.
What does “RIYL” stand for?
“Recommended If You Like” is a phrase college radio DJs and record reviewers have used forever to describe similar artists. Pronounced rile (verb): to make agitated and angry.
RIYL is recommended if you like: deep cuts, making unsolicited playlists for your friends and lovers, moshing, a little bit of dead air, free will, debating the best album openers of all time, and scanning the airwaves
Where does the data come from?
The data on this site comes from playlist logs submitted by college radio stations to Spinitron from Jan 1, 2026 – May 3, 2026. Participating stations granted Spinitron permission to share spin data with RIYL for this purpose under Spinitron’s terms of service. Participating stations notified their DJs and provided an opportunity to opt out of having their data displayed. DJs who opted out are not included in this site.
I’m a DJ. Can I have my data removed from the site?
Yes. If you are a DJ and would like your data removed, please email hello@riyl.fm.
What’s considered a “new release”?
Anything released on or after January 1, 2026. We pull release dates from MusicBrainz, Discogs and Last.fm.
Did you use AI to build this?
The curation and the design of the site are all human. Claude Code was used as a development tool to build the frontend of the site, visualize the data and set up the approach to data analysis. All data calculations are completed without the use of AI.
How is the data stored?
Raw spin data stays on the computer it’s processed on and gets deleted upon project completion. The only thing stored online are the aggregated metrics you see here.
Will this project happen again? Can my station be part of the next one?
Spring 2026 is a pilot! If it lands, we’ll run this again at the end of the year with more stations. Submit your station to be included in the next recap here.