Radio Paradise is a popular and pioneering Internet radio station that defines itself as "eclectic online rock radio". The channel differs from most FM channels and other Internet stations in that the music
played is not limited to any specific genre but instead represents
great variety. Radio Paradise mostly plays different styles of pop and rock music, but occasionally also everything from jazz to classical to electronic music and world music.
All of the styles are DJ-mixed. Radio Paradise is a for-profit
business. Rather than selling their service or running commercials,
they financially support the station through donations, merchandise and
purchases via on-line stores.
Radio Paradise streams are available in MP3, HE-AAC (AAC+), WMA and RealAudio in various bitrates, and can be accessed through Apple's iTunes radio tuner service as well as the SHOUTcast Radio search feature available in the Winamp player and the Shoutcast web site. The station can also be found under the "Cool Streams" playlist built into the Amarok Media Player.
It is consistently one of the most popular stations on the Radio Roku
service. The record number of concurrent listeners (as of January 2006)
has passed the 10,000 mark.
The web site offers listeners the ability to rate and comment on individual songs on the playlist, as well as songs on the Listener Review Channel, which consists of songs uploaded by listeners to be considered for airplay.
Aside from providing a varied selection of music, Radio Paradise also has a lively on-line community via its song comments, forums, journals,
comments section and contests (through donations) on the web site. More
than 30,000 users have registered from various parts of the world, and
the community is growing daily.
The web site uses customized open-source software components for most of its sections. Some of the technologies used include PHP and BBCode.