The SHOUTcast Yellow Pages

The directory that listed every station on the network, ranked by who was actually listening — and what is left of it.

If you looked for internet radio between 1999 and the mid 2000s, you probably went through one page. The SHOUTcast Yellow Pages listed every station running Nullsoft's streaming server, in a plain table, ordered by how many people were listening at that moment. Two buttons per row: Tune In!, which handed a playlist file to Winamp, and Chat!. No recommendations, no algorithm, no personalisation. A column of numbers and a way in.

One afternoon in December 2001

The Internet Archive kept a copy of the front page from 17 December 2001. The statistics box in the corner read:

Listeners — 34,606
Servers — 2,613
247,390,197 served
All Natural · No Preservatives · 98% FAT FREE!

Thirty-four thousand people, worldwide, at once. The station at number one was Digitally Imported — "European Trance, Techno, Hi-NRG" — with 2624/3445 listeners against its cap, at 128kbps. Below it: Wolf FM, Groove Salad from SomaFM, SmoothJazz.com, Radiostorm, Radio Paradise, KPIG. Several of those are still broadcasting today; Groove Salad had about 1,900 listeners while this page was being written.

The columns were Rank, Action, Genre [Description], Listeners/Max and Bitrate. Rank meant listeners. That is the whole design: the station with the most people on it went at the top, and you could see how close it was to its own capacity.

How a station got on it

The server did the work. A station ran Nullsoft's DNAS — the Distributed Network Audio Server — and set it to publish, and the server reported itself in to yp.shoutcast.com along with its genre, bitrate, current track and listener count. The directory did not go looking; stations volunteered.

The protocol tags all begin with ICY, which stands, wonderfully, for "I Can Yell". That header is still how a stream announces its name, its bitrate and the title of the song playing, and it is still how this site reads a track title off a station that publishes nothing else.

One quirk from that era is alive and causing trouble today. A SHOUTcast server checks the user-agent, and a browser asking for the bare stream address gets the server's own status page instead of audio. The workaround was to append a semicolon — you will still find /;stream.nsv in playlists written twenty years ago. Dogglounge's own stream, listed in every modern directory as a plain address, plays silence in a browser for exactly this reason until you add the ;.

What happened to it

SHOUTcast was created in 1998 at Nullsoft, the company behind Winamp. AOL bought Nullsoft on 1 June 1999, a few months after the directory found its audience. Listening kept growing for another decade: by 2011 the public streams carried up to 900,000 concurrent listeners at peak hours.

On 14 January 2014, AOL sold Nullsoft to the Belgian radio aggregator Radionomy. The software was rebranded from SHOUTcast to Shoutcast in 2018, and in 2020 Radionomy closed its own streaming service and moved onto the Shoutcast platform. The directory never switched off — directory.shoutcast.com is still there, listing tens of thousands of stations. What ended was its place as the way in. Stations moved to Icecast, to hosting panels, to platforms that publish nothing at all, and the listing stopped being the map of internet radio.

What replaced it, and what did not

The closest successor is Radio Browser, an open, community-run directory that anyone can query without a key. Nearly every modern radio app is built on it. It knows a station's name, genre, country, homepage and stream address — and nothing whatever about who is listening right now.

That is the piece that did not survive, and it is a real loss. The old directory could rank by listeners because stations reported in. Nothing collects that today, so the only way to know is to ask each station's own server, one at a time. We did that across a sample of 297 stations in September 2026: about one in four publishes a listener count at all. The rest sit behind CDNs with no origin to ask, or run servers whose operators switched the statistics off.

Some of the refusals are deliberate and pointed. Every one of SomaFM's Icecast status endpoints is stubbed: ask status-json.xsl and you get, in place of figures, a request for donations. They publish the numbers themselves instead, in one document covering all 46 channels — which is the better figure anyway, since it totals their relays.

And some of what is published is not true. Three separate streams on one German network return an identical line — 5,000 listeners, 5,000 peak, 5,000 maximum, 2 unique — unchanged minute after minute. Two unique listeners and five thousand current cannot both be the case. The old Yellow Pages had the same problem, and for the same reason: a ranking by listeners is worth gaming.

Why this site exists

ypshout is a working rebuild of that page, drawn from the Internet Archive's copy and wired to what is actually available now. The listing is live, the ranking is by real listeners where a station will say, and the numbers that cannot be trusted are marked rather than quietly dropped. How this page gets its numbers sets out exactly where each figure comes from.

Sources. The December 2001 front page and its figures come from the Internet Archive's capture of shoutcast.com. Corporate dates and the 2011 and 2022 listener and station figures come from Wikipedia's Shoutcast article. Everything about which servers answer what was measured directly from this site in September 2026.