How a tiny cult radio station in Hackney took over the world

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's 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 (which stands for "Nuts to Soup", the name of a blog Adeyemi was writing at the time and a play on the phrase "soup to nuts") has grown from a local experiment into a global phenomenon with a dedicated cult following.

Over the past 13 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 to its three million monthly listeners spanning 232 countries and territories. "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.