Bored of traditional radio? The wired world has transformed broadcasting out of all recognition. Here are ten new stations, podcasts and web feeds that will change the way you listen... and prove that it's not just the same old show on your radio.

1) KCRW, Santa Monica, California
If it was a magazine, they'd call it "Intelligent Life On Planet Rock", or something

KCRW broadcasts from a university basement, but a university basement in Santa Monica, California, so it's about as slick as radio stations get, with a website that allows you to stream live and archived programmes, or listen live via iTunes. It's a talk station as well, so when they say music they mean it - there's almost no conversation between records. The jewel in its crown is the weekday 9am-12 slot, Morning Becomes Eclectic, now 30 years old and hosted by Nic Harcourt, an ear-ringed Johnny Walker-alike from Birmingham (England) via Australia who's also the station's music director. The shows I listened to featured Sufjan Stevens, Crowded House, Clinic, solo Ray Davies, Vampire Weekend, Roy Budd, Gnarls Barkley, Plant & Krauss, an acoustic cover of Love Will Tear Us Apart and great big half-hour live sessions from Duffy, Grizzly Bear, Lizz Wright and The Duke Spirit. Other shows either follow this template (or lack of), or are more specialist (jazz, soul, singer-songwriters). KCRW may be a little too tasteful and grown up, but with that kind of range and a total lack of the "I love the Arctic Monkeys, me" desperation of UK radio, it is very bloody heaven. It's now my station of choice. JAMES MEDD
http://www.kcrw.com, podcasts via iTunes

2) Speechification
Never miss great radio again

Good speech radio is hard to do, expensive to produce and missed by most of the people to whom it's addressed - so it's become an endangered species in modern radio. Hence Speechification, which acts as a kind of audio game warden, conserving the best and herding it into a place where you can appreciate it. The majority of the stuff it curates began life on BBC radio - Tom Mangold's history of the FBI, Alyn Shipton's study of the effect that Bing Crosby had on popular music and the brilliant Don't Hang Up, in which somebody rings phone boxes in the middle of the night and just talks to whomever answers - but it also takes in great stuff from National Public Radio in the States, such as Will Self attempting to walk into Manhattan from LaGuardia Airport and the Kitchen Sisters' brilliant ten-minute items about food culture in America, plus interesting stuff from RTE, ABC in Australia and anyone else who does great speech radio in English. And because most of them do it for love rather than money, it's all worth listening to. They even provide the best of it as a podcast. DAVID HEPWORTH
http://www.speechification.com, podcasts via iTunes

3) The Sound Of Young America
From Japanese toy experts to Miles Davis's missus, it's like Start The Week with cool people

Let's face it, UK radio doesn't talk well about fun stuff - the glowering spirit of Lord Reith tends to make Radio 4 err on the side of worthiness. When pop culture does get a look in, it constantly has to justify its presence while someone like John Humphrys or James Naughtie sniffs disparagingly in the background.

Jesse Thorn's The Sound Of Young America is the complete antithesis of this. Billed as "a public radio show about things that are awesome", it features the San Franciscan comedian-presenter simply talking to people who make or do cool stuff. Whether it's crime novel king Elmore Leonard, porno-soul legend Swamp Dogg or Tank Girl/Gorillaz creator Jamie Hewlett, Thorn talks to them all in an easy, informed style that assumes the listener is hip to their output or at least the field in which they work. While that can make conversations with some of the more obscure stand-up comics a little excluding, most of the time it means there's a connection and a conversation worth listening in to. MATT HALL
http://www.maximumfun.org, podcasts via iTunes

4) Blog Fresh Radio, New York
Reading the music blogs for you - and playing you the best bits

Music blogs are one of the wonders of the connected world - hundreds of music fans, many of them specialists in their fields, post obscure, new or just neglected MP3s on their blogs with a little commentary. Sometimes a conversation starts, sometimes a career takes off or is reignited… but how to navigate it all? How do you find your way from Stereogum's alternative US tunefeed to the new country world of Twangville to Headphone Sex's electro-indieverse?

The answer is - neologism alert! - the new world of the "bloggregator". Blog Fresh Radio reads nearly 50 music blogs around the world for you, talks to the bloggers and compiles the results into an entertaining hour-long podcast that answers the question that has gnawed at music fans since time immemorial: what's happening? The show might come out of New York but the podcast - presented by a personable blogger called Abbey from punkphoto.com - is mercifully free of the try-hard hey-wow over-eagerness that ruins most new music radio. You get the strong impression that the Blog Fresh Radio people and their guests actually like music and don't require some spurious notion of hotness to validate their interest. Also, because many of the acts are unsigned, BFR can carry full tracks on its podcast, and a separate Song Of The Day feed sends you a new, handpicked track each day via the subscribe function of iTunes. They're even compiling a worldwide chart of the most blogged-about bands (number one as we went to press: The Breeders). We're big fans. Who else will keep you up on the latest Scandinavian bands in a section called Nord du Jour? ANDREW HARRISON
http://www.blogfreshradio.com, podcasts via iTunes

5) Resonance FM, London
"Art radio" bastion of non-conformist amateur enthusiasm

Resonance FM is to Radio 4 what Brian Eno is to Coldplay. They're nominally doing the same thing and they might even cross over now and again, but there's no doubt which one is stretching the boundaries and giving the listener a mental workout. Variously described as "art radio", an "invisible gallery", simply an alternative speech station or - inevitably - "You And Yours on drugs", the Arts Council-funded Resonance is a truly unique broadcaster dedicated to putting the neglected and the bizarre on the air. So yes, if you want clanky, skronky music it's there in spades: this is, after all, the station of the Cyber Chutney Arse Duck Show, and DJs like Marvin Suicide playing records by people called Ebola. But there's also the perhaps more palatable likes Rough Trade's own Counter Culture Radio, Calling All Pensioners for militant OAPs, current affairs shows like Middle East Panorama and the American leftist bulletin Democracy Now, and a new sketch comedy from Julia Nighty Night Davis and Jessica Spaced Hynes with the decidedly non-Radio 4 title Peppatits. With live streaming and archived podcasts, you are as likely to find soundtracks, Americana, northern soul, an hour-long interview with Shirley Collins or established comedy names like Kevin Eldon doing the sort of thoughtful, quirky pieces you hear all too rarely on radio. In fact Resonance is like all the best bits of Radio 4, but concentrated: eccentricity, passion and an uncynical enthusiasm about knowledge for knowledge's sake. You might find you can't do without it. JOE MUGGS
http://www.resonancefm.com, broadcast on 104.4FM in some of London, selected podcasts via iTunes

6) WFMU, Jersey City, New Jersey
Fantastic freeform radio leaves no genre unturned

An anomaly in the relentlessly commercial world of American radio, where every second of output is shaped by computerised playlisting and tailored to suit the station's commercial interests, Jersey City-based WFMU is ad-free, funded entirely by listener donation and programmed exclusively by its expert DJs. The result is close in spirit to THE WORD and quite possibly the world's best radio station. WFMU is 50 years old this year.

Highlights include an extraordinary soul and funk show by Mr Fine Wine ("serving all your boogaloo needs since 1994") where all the selections played are from ancient, crackly seven-inch 45s, Rich Hazelton's Inflatable Squirrel Carcass, which leaps from Chubby Checker to Goran Bregovic to Ry Cooder with an abandon that would terrify the suits at 6Music, and the breakfast show, Nachum Segal's unthinkably upbeat Jewish Moments In The Morning, where obscure klezmer-pop-disco singles nestle cosily next to news bulletins aimed at New York's Jewish community. There is, quite literally, never a dull moment.

It's easy to access, too. Nearly all the WFMU shows are available as podcasts from iTunes, while most can be streamed online in a variety of formats, including geek-friendly Ogg Vorbis. Everything is archived, playlists are stored online, and last year it became the first station to offer live steaming to Apple's iPhone. Robert Plant is a fan. So is Lou Reed. And Matt Groening. This is radio as it should be, but invariably isn't. FRASER LEWRY
http://www.wfmu.org, podcasts via iTunes

7) The London Pirate Listening Station
From tower blocks to the world - hear pirate radio via your PC

When I was a young country kid visiting relatives in London, pirate radio stations (then predominantly reggae) seemed impossibly exotic and alien to me. In my rave-era adolescence, cassette tapes of pirate broadcasts provided bulletins from an underground I craved access to; but now I actually live in south London, they're simply a part of the fabric of life. So it has been truly fascinating discovering the London Pirate Listening Station online, which makes it all exotic once again.

LPLS essentially picks up a range of around 20 London stations on a massive aerial and makes them available worldwide, through a wonderfully terse and forbidding-looking black and grey webpage. The slightly clunky site, the way stations disappear unexpectedly into static and the fact that London's musical and oral culture - even shouted adverts for hairdressers and nightclubs - are interesting enough for people all over the world to tune in to - all these give an air of mystery and excitement that homogenised corporate portals could never recreate. The endless variants on house and drum'n'bass, the wonderful R&B and lovers' rock, the ponderous Rasta and Muslim preachers and backroom philosophers can all be fascinating in their own right, but this is one instance where the medium is at least as enthralling as the message. JOE MUGGS
http://scanner.irational.org/

8) Channel 4 Radio
They've got the new John Peel and… not a lot else

Channel 4 are piling into radio - but they will have to do better than this if they're going to get a foothold on the new frontier. Channel4Radio offers an uneven but intriguing suite of podcasts and live streams, some from many of the station's TV programmes and some not, with archived radio adjuncts to Richard & Judy, Popworld, Skins, Shameless and more. But it's all pretty old and the new material mainly consists of young Tom Ravenscroft playing his strange indie records in the corner. Ravenscroft is John Peel's son, and it shows: same offhand intonation, same likeable, self-deprecating wit and vague air, same mix of new music from dub to noise to techno to nu-folk. He seems to be all that's going on while C4Radio turns into several "real" DAB radio stations, starting this summer with E4 Radio, aimed at "15 to 29-year-olds looking for the best of what's new in music, comedy and entertainment". For now, C4Radio is all about '70s-style big-voice announcements and stings celebrating "the place to hear the freshest new beats, bands, basslines and bombs". Compared to the unforced intimacy of podcasts, it all sounds rather "old radio". JAMES MEDD
http://www.channel4radio.com, podcasts via iTunes

9) NPR's All Songs Considered, USA
None-more-WORD-friendly treasure trove of live concerts, guest DJ sets and more

National Public Radio is a funny old thing. America's public broadcasting network sometimes seems terrified of broadcasting anything other than innocuous, mildly liberal, middle-of-the-road chat. It's as if they're scared that by saying anything interesting, they might take audience away from the country's commercial broadcasting giants and thereby incur their wrath - because public broadcasting in America lives in perpetual fear of closure.

But this unwillingness to seek out a mainstream audience means, perversely, that their music coverage is fantastic. None more so than All Songs Considered, a half-hour, genre-straddling journey between music styles that goes out weekly. One recent show managed to incorporate The Jesus And Mary Chain, Peter Gabriel and Vampire Weekend, topping it all off with a Billie Holiday track from a 5-CD box-set of her live recordings. Presenter Bob Bollen links the whole thing in a nerdy-but-nice manner, and the programme is adept at carrying out the function that most mainstream radio has forgotten - introducing you to something new that you might love. On occasion Bollen invites like-minded celebs in to DJ: Thom Yorke, Mark Ronson, Joanna Newsom and film director John Waters have all guested. Other shows are themed, from folk music of the British Isles to recent live albums.

And that's before you click on unedited live concerts from Josh Ritter, Neko Case, Black Mountain, Jose Gonzalez, Rilo Kiley or Nick Lowe. Like the John Peel or Andy Kershaw shows of yore, this is radio that doesn't talk down to you and assumes that your record collection is a thing you want to grow. MATT HALL
http://www.npr.org, podcasts via iTunes

10) AOL Radio
A mass of free streaming music for those who can dig it out

WORD readers might consider anything with AOL in its name to be a bit vanilla and, to be fair, AOL's massive music hub is big on breadth. There's certainly a lot of crushingly bland American smooth jazz and FM rock on there, and we challenge anyone to get through more than ten minutes of the "ALL KORN" stream. But there's depth too. The hip hop streams, in every permutation from reggaeton to Dirty South to mixtapes, are worthwhile, as are the limited number of talk stations. AOL Radio is essentially a way to access America's subscription-based XM satellite radio stations for free, which means you can get anything from NPR to klezmer to baroque classical via your PC. The obsessive slicing and dicing of micro-genres gets a little self-parodic at time - put your hands in the air for Melancholia: The Sounds Of Indie Sadness - but essentially this is a big pile of free music all streaming away at you, with next to no DJs getting in the way. Judicious station selection can pay off. Our favourites: '70s Black Music, Daft Punk Radio and the very WORD-friendly XM Deep Tracks, which last we looked was playing Al Kooper. ANDREW HARRISON
http://www.music.aol.com/radioguide/bb