South Africa has more than five hundred licensed broadcasters, and most of them now stream. That abundance is great once you know your way around and paralysing before you do. This guide is organised by what you want out of a station rather than by who owns it.
If you want news and current affairs
Talk radio is South Africa's strongest format by some distance. The big-city talk stations run rolling news, phone-ins and interview shows with the politicians and analysts you will read about the next morning. They also carry the traffic and load-shedding updates that make them genuinely useful on a weekday. Start with the news and talk category, which collects the national and metro talk stations in one place.
For headlines without the debate, the SABC's national services run bulletins at the top of the hour in each official language — worth knowing if you want to keep up a language you do not use daily.
If you want the current sound of the country
Amapiano moved from Gauteng townships to the centre of South African pop in a few short years, and radio followed. Some stations play it all day; many others give it the afternoon drive and weekend slots. The amapiano stations page is the fastest way in, and house and dance covers the deeper Afro house and gqom end of the same scene.
If you want to hear a specific language
This is where South African radio really earns its reputation. Between the SABC's language services and the community sector you can find full-day broadcasting in isiZulu, isiXhosa, Sesotho, Setswana, Sepedi, Xitsonga, Tshivenda, siSwati, isiNdebele, Afrikaans and English. Afrikaans stations have their own page; for the others, browse by province — Limpopo, KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape are the strongest for indigenous-language broadcasting.
If you want gospel or worship
Sunday mornings on South African radio are a genre of their own, and several stations run gospel and Christian teaching seven days a week. See gospel and Christian radio.
If you want community radio
Community stations are the largest slice of the dial and the least visible online. They are where you hear local funerals announced, local businesses advertised and local music that never reaches national playlists. If you have moved away from a town, the community station is the thing that actually sounds like home. Browse the community radio category or pick your province from the province index.
If you are listening from outside South Africa
Most South African streams are not geo-blocked, which is why expat listening is such a large share of online radio traffic. National talk and the SABC language services travel best; live sport is the main thing that gets restricted, because those rights are sold country by country.
A note on picking by bitrate
Every station page here lists the stream's bitrate and roughly how much data an hour costs. On a capped mobile bundle, a 64 kbps talk stream at around 28 MB per hour is a completely different proposition from a 192 kbps music stream at 85 MB. For talk, low bitrate costs you nothing you would notice.