Overview
Monty Sounds Radio is an independent internet radio station that plays original Monty Sounds music twenty-four hours a day, streaming from Poland. Every track on air is my own. There are no adverts, no sign-in and nothing to choose.
It's part of Monty Network, and like the rest of the network it was designed, built and is run by one person: me.
This case study covers why the station exists, how a new track reaches the air, the many ways people can listen, and how, in November 2026, the station moved off WordPress to a new home of its own.
Monty Sounds Radio at a Glance
Always on air. Original music only. One press of a button between a listener and the station.
Why I Built It
After the army, before I travelled, I worked as a DJ. Music has been part of my life ever since, and these days I make my own as Monty Sounds.
A catalogue is a wonderful thing if you know what you're looking for. Most people don't. They want music on while they cook, work or drive, without deciding what comes next.
Not everyone wants to choose. The radio lets people simply press play and listen.
One rule for the station.
Whenever someone tunes in, something is already playing. No queue to build, no account to make, no decision to take.
The Challenge
A station that never stops has a simple promise and an awkward set of problems behind it:
- it has to keep playing when there's nobody in the studio, at three in the afternoon or three in the morning
- a listener should see what's playing, with its artwork, without asking
- it has to be easy to find, because a radio nobody hears is just a server humming to itself
- listening shouldn't be interrupted by the website around it
- one person has to run it alongside everything else in the network
Of these, finding it turned out to be the hardest. The radio is the newest site in the network and has the fewest visitors. People who find it tend to stay. The problem is discovery, not retention, and that shaped most of the decisions below.
One Station, Many Doors
If the problem is discovery, every place a listener already is should have a door into the station. So the same live stream reaches people in nine different ways.
- montysoundsradio.com
- Inside Monty Sounds
- Android phone app
- Google TV app
- TuneIn
- radio.net
- VRadio
- MyTuner
- Alexa
The phone and TV apps are free, need no account and carry no advertising. They're downloaded directly rather than through an app store. The TV app began as a copy of the phone app, given larger artwork for the big screen, because a radio suits a TV that's simply left playing.
Inside Monty Sounds, the radio sits one tap away from the whole catalogue, and every track I put on SoundCloud carries a link and a button back to the station.
The many doors have one side effect. Website visits undercount the station's real reach, because people listening on TuneIn or through Alexa never visit the website at all.
The Road to Air
A new track doesn't reach the station by accident. It follows the same short path every time, tracked in Notion so nothing is missed.
- NotionThe track is added to the Singles database
- SoundCloudUploaded, with a link back to the radio
- The stationUploaded to the radio's own library
- On airA box ticked, and it's in the rotation
Each step has its own checkbox, ticked by hand. It's deliberately simple. When I look at a track in Notion, I can see at a glance whether it's on the radio yet.
A New Home
Until November 2026 the station's website ran on WordPress. It worked, but it was heavy for what is, at heart, a single button. In late October 2026 I rebuilt it from scratch as a small static site on Cloudflare, published straight from GitHub. It went live on 3 November.
The design follows the Monty Sounds TV app, so the station looks the same on a television, a laptop and a phone. The studio picture fills the screen. On a phone, the player rises over the lower half of it.
- What's on, at a glance. The Now Playing card shows the track, its artwork and the four tracks before it, from the same live feed the TV app uses, refreshed every twenty seconds.
- Nothing interrupts the music. Links that lead away from the player open in a new tab, so the stream keeps playing.
- One stream at a time. Open the station in two tabs and start the second: the first one pauses itself, so you never hear the radio twice.
- A quiet tab. The browser tab shows the track name only while you're listening; the rest of the time it simply says Monty Sounds Radio.
- Easy to share. Every page has a proper preview card, a site map and a description search engines can read.
Two short pages sit beside the player: About, for the station's story, and Ways to Listen, which gathers every door from the chapter above.
Two Languages
The station streams from Poland, so it speaks Polish as well as English. Every page has the same gold EN and PL buttons as the rest of Monty Network, and the player's own words change too: Ready to listen becomes Gotowe do słuchania, and Play live radio becomes Słuchaj na żywo.
The Polish pages are built from the English ones, so the two never drift apart. One honest exception: Alexa doesn't speak Polish yet, so the Polish page tells listeners to ask for the station in English.
Keeping It on Air
A station that never sleeps still needs someone to notice if it stops. That someone is Monty Control, the network's control centre.
- Health. Monty Control reads the site's own health check and shows the station alongside every other site in the network.
- Outside eyes. An independent monitor watches the site from outside and sends an email and a Telegram message the moment it goes down.
- Links. The Link Checker crawls every page and opens a ticket if a link breaks.
- Listening. Monty Stats counts visits and every press of the play button, without collecting anything personal.
None of this means a 3am rescue. The network isn't a business. If something fails overnight, the alert is waiting when I wake, and fixing it by nine o'clock is fine.
The station keeps playing. The control centre keeps watching. I get to sleep.
Results
The move to the new home was the station's biggest change since it went on air, and it landed cleanly.
The bigger result is simpler. The station's website now matches what the station is: a single button, quick to load on any screen, in two languages, with nothing between a listener and the music.
Figures as of 3 November 2026, from Cloudflare, the Link Checker and GitHub.
What's Next
With the new home in place, the work turns from building to being found.
- More doors, more often. Posts about the station itself, not just the tracks, across the network's social accounts.
- A tracks section. A way to go from something heard on the radio to the track itself, and the rest of the catalogue.
- Still no sign-in. The radio stays free and open. That rule isn't up for review.
What I've learnt
A radio station is the most patient thing I've built. It doesn't need me to be there. It needs a way in for the next listener, and something keeping an eye on it while I sleep.
Press play. Something's always on air.