“I think the most obscure place I’ve had a listener email from so far was probably a guy in the Yukon,” laughs Flo Dill, the host of NTS radio’s flagship morning show. “He downloads the show and buffers it so he can listen to it while he’s mining underground. Isn’t that so cool?”
“One of our colleagues walked into a shop in Mongolia and the guy was playing NTS, and he had one of our stickers on his wall,” adds Sean McAuliffe, NTS’ CEO. “Wearing an NTS t-shirt in another country, you're bound to have someone recognise it and come up to you. It's a really lovely feeling – it’s almost like a family.”
It has been quite the journey for the radio station, which began life as a one-man-band in a tiny studio tucked away in Dalston's historic Gillett Square. Since it was founded by then-music blogger and DJ Femi Adeyemi in 2011, NTS has grown from a local experiment into a global phenomenon with a dedicated cult following. Over the last 15 years, it has been disrupting the industry's norms, inviting underground DJs, experimental musicians and selectors from around the globe to take the reins. It is now a stalwart in the underground music scene, streaming its three million monthly listeners spanning 232 countries across the world.
“It started mainly out of a frustration with traditional radio”, says 43-year-old Adeyemi when we meet on Gillett Square, where NTS is still based. “I always found it a struggle to find what I wanted to listen to – it was the same stuff all the time.”
When it comes to musical range, NTS is unrivalled. Stream either of its two channels for an entire day and you might not recognise a single artist. It is fiercely genre-agnostic – from deep cuts of Japanese city pop, South African Gqom or ambient techno, most of the music the station plays is not available on Spotify.
Growing up on an estate in Archway, Adeyemi was always immersed in the London music scene, and had been writing a music blog and DJing as a side hustle while flitting between jobs in retail and marketing. Like many budding creatives, he used to spend his down time in Gillett Square, known for both its black radical history and musical heritage.
“I was chatting to the guy owns Vortex Jazz Bar [on Gillett Square] one day, and he had a space that used to sell old jazz records,” Adeyemi says. “It wasn't really being used for much because no one was buying his CDs. I didn’t have a job, and was figuring out what I wanted to do next, and I just said to him, ‘What are you doing with the space?’ He was like ‘nothing, do you have any ideas?’ And then the radio thing just came into my head.”
After spending some time teaching himself how to stream – “I’m not a naturally techy person”, he laughs – Adeyemi put up a few posters around the city to attract DJs, which simply read: “independent radio station in London.”
“I thought I’d probably get about 10 to 15 people reply,” he says. “But there were almost 60 people. I realised, ‘wow, there’s some legs in this’. So what initially was going be a bit of a hobby on the side quickly turned into something I had to invest all my energy into.”
Inspired by a combination of the DIY spirit of pirate and American college radio, Adeyemi aired the station’s first broadcast in April 2011 – an unpolished but intoxicating mix of beats, basslines, and voices from the underground. The name NTS came from the music blog Adeyemi was writing called Nuts to Soup, a play on the American phrase “soup to nuts”, and also a deep cut Simpsons reference. Within its first few months, NTS got picked up by indie magazines like Dazed, and word soon began to spread about NTS’ no-rules approach to music curation, and artists and listeners from across the globe tuned in, seeking out a platform that celebrated sounds from the fringes. The station’s roster expanded rapidly, attracting a diverse array of resident hosts, from rising underground stars to established legends like Andrew Weatherall, Gilles Peterson, and Four Tet.
“I think the timing of NTS when it first launched, it was really needed,” Adeyemi says. “We were some of the first people to sort of really invest in physical space, rather than it being in someone's home as a hobby. And that helped foster the community around the DJs.”
In 2015, the station expanded, opening a studio in Manchester and one in Los Angeles the following year. Now, NTS hosts around 600 shows a month — around 500 from residents and roughly 100 from guest DJs — in cities across the world, including Beirut, Accra and Ho Chi Minh.
“The plan was always to make it a global thing,” says Adeyemi. “But it could only ever have started in London. It’s such a diverse city – even just in Gillett Square there are so many different languages spoken. So it allowed such a wide range of shows.”
“It’s also about the city’s musical history,” adds Dill. “If you think about the way that musical genres have come out of London, it's from proximity of people living together, like Indian street soul, or Irish rock – it's a real, true melting pot.”
“Radio is traditionally a local thing, but what really elevated NTS was when we were like, ‘let's broadcast from hundreds of cities around the world’,” adds McAuliffe. “Like, why does it have to be anchored to a specific city? Music is such a global thing. So it was just about kind of using pretty budget technology to basically tweak it a bit to essentially be able to really easily and seamlessly broadcast from across the world.
“So it felt like a different approach to radio altogether. We ripped up the rule book about what radio is, and that has really defined us.”
The station’s listenership skyrocketed during the Covid lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 as lonely audiences craved human connection – a time which Adeyemi describes as both “exciting” and “deeply stressful, financially”.
With no on-air adverts, NTS relies on a variety of revenue streams. Their DJs are paid through a subscription model, NTS supporters – McAuliffe says their subscribers number in the “tens of thousands”. Festivals in Bali and London, partnerships with institutions like the ICA, Tate and MoMA, and regular block parties on Gillett Square also help pay the bills. Recently, they have also launched a clothing collection with Adidas, and created marketing campaigns for brands like Carhartt, Netflix and Sonos.
“The money has to come from somewhere, and we've been very transparent about that with our listeners,” says McAuliffe. “For a long time it was about survival. It was hard in the early days because we were small and we kind of got pushed around. We needed money, but we did also turn down a lot of things that could have fundamentally changed NTS as a business – big tobacco companies, for example, and some other god-awful organisations. We're super proud about doing that – we've managed to maintain our integrity. We always put music first, and we’re very selective about who we work with.”
As the platform continues to grow and acquire more mainstream partnerships, is there a risk that it loses the grassroots edge that made it so popular in the first place?
“I feel there's something inherent in the format that slightly prevents it from ever truly shifting, because you can have a billion listeners and the radio is still the same,” says Dill. “There are so many people interested in alternative, non-commercial music that you don't hear pumped out of the radio or a Spotify algorithm. So, if suddenly tomorrow 50 billion people tuned in to the radio, what would really change?”
Adeyemi agrees. “NTS is in a corner of music where the people we're speaking to are deep music lovers and people,” he says. “There are so many people around the world that do that. I don't think we've even scratched the surface.”
