About OnRadioNow

OnRadioNow has been tracking the songs played on BBC radio since 2009 - every play on Radio 1, Radio 2, 1Xtra and 6 Music, stored into a searchable archive of millions of songs.

I originally built this site purely for my own use. Back in 2009 as a teenager I wanted to know what songs were playing on the radio - and once I'd managed that, I found that capturing the song data and storing it in a database was a fun, useful and rewarding problem to keep tackling.

Back then the site was called Radio 1 Now and was featured in the Hacking The BBC e-book as part of the BBC Backstage project. In July 2012 I renamed it OnRadioNow as the other BBC stations were added to the database.

The site has been through several versions over the years, advancing with each rebuild. This 2026 version is the latest - a complete rebuild on a modern stack, while keeping the full song archive going right back to the start.

Some screenshots from across the years - orange and black, Radio 1 Now, and the early "Songs Archive" pages.

Over its lifetime the site has swung between server-side PHP and client-side JavaScript. The current version is built on PHP 8 and MySQL, with htmx and Tailwind CSS on the front-end for a fast, live interface.

This version was developed with heavy use of AI tooling - for the design direction, the architecture, the migration of nearly two decades of legacy data, and a lot of the code itself. It's made the site noticeably more usable and useful than I could have built alone in the time available.

A scheduled job collects the song listings every few minutes from the Last.fm scrobbler feeds for each station:

• ws.audioscrobbler.com · user/bbcradio1
• ws.audioscrobbler.com · user/bbcradio2
• ws.audioscrobbler.com · user/bbc1xtra
• ws.audioscrobbler.com · user/bbc6music

A long-standing thank you to Chris Riley of trackplaying, who first pointed me to these feeds back in the early days.

Artist and song details — countries, genres, years active and song release dates — come from MusicBrainz, the open music encyclopedia. Artist photos and biographies are pulled from Wikipedia.

Q) I think some songs or artists are missing.
A) The site collects listings from external feeds. If a song never appeared in those feeds, it won't be in the archive.

Q) How far back does the data go?
A) The archive reaches back to the site's earliest days in 2006–2009, depending on the station. Any gaps are limited by what the source feeds still hold.

Got another question? Drop me a line and I'll answer it.