How to listen to BBC Radio outside the UK
Even though you can’t download the BBC Sounds app any more, it’s still very possible to listen to all BBC Radio stations, wherever you are. Here’s how.
Visit the websites
You can listen to these stations on the BBC’s international website:
For the rest, even though BBC Sounds has closed, you can still listen to BBC national, nations and local radio, anywhere in the world. Here’s a full list of all the other radio stations.
All these links work just fine on your mobile phone as well as on your laptop.
Tip: you can also just guess based on the old website addresses. bbc.co.uk/radio1 or bbc.co.uk/radioleeds work fine.
Use an app
BBC Radio 4 and BBC World Service English are available in the BBC app, which is free for everyone.
While the other stations aren’t in the BBC app, you will find them in others. Two that I know work well are:
- TuneIn (the free version of the app is fine)
- Apple Music (if you’re a subscriber) has live radio
On demand radio
On-demand is no longer available outside the UK.
However, most speech programmes are available in podcast form. You can find BBC Podcasts in most podcast apps; like Apple Podcasts or Pocket Casts. These podcasts contain advertising outside the UK. With Apple Podcasts, you can pay a monthly subscription which removes the ads from some BBC podcasts, and gives you early access to some shows too.
As at Jul 31, 2025, BBC Studios released a statement saying “we are adding catch-up functionality”. I would expect that to be for Radio 4 and World Service only.
Do I get more access if I subscribe to the BBC?
Some parts of the BBC’s website are paid-for in the US, and you need a subscription to access it.
That subscription does not include any access to additional radio stations or catch-up radio.
Rights restrictions
Rights deals for sports commentaries, particularly football or the Olympics, means that you may not always have access to some of these radio stations. (When the Olympics are on, those rights even include news reports, so often all BBC radio closes down overseas, with the exception of BBC World Service.)
Going on holiday?
If you’re in the UK, you can ignore all the above. You can still download and install the BBC Sounds app, and it will continue working for you while you’re on holiday anywhere in the world (up to 30 days).
Why not just use a VPN?
For international users, if you still have the BBC Sounds app installed, then you may be able to use it with a VPN. My own tests suggest that if you connect once using a UK VPN, you appear to then be treated by the app as “going on holiday” - so you can leave your VPN off most of the time.
But, it’s trivial to block a VPN; and trivial to stop this working. And VPNs aren’t always the right choice.
How many people used to use BBC Sounds overseas?
On the BBC’s Feedback programme on Jul 11 2025, BBC Sounds boss Jonathan Wall said:
“There were 320,000 people who listened ex-UK to Sounds last week. The vast majority were listening to Radio 4 live, World Service live, and our music stations live. So the vast majority of people are getting exactly what they’ve had: just on a different digital product.”
This compares to an average of 4.8mn UK users, according to the last BBC Annual Report.
Why did they close the BBC Sounds app?
The BBC hasn’t actually given a reason. But this is my understanding…
Although it doesn’t look like it, the BBC is really two different companies these days - the public service broadcaster for the UK, which is paid-for by the licence fee, and a commercial company tasked with earning revenue for the BBC everywhere else, called BBC Studios (formerly BBC Worldwide).
BBC Sounds was paid-for by the public service broadcaster and really only intended for the UK; but, more importantly, the music rights for radio stations like Radio 2 or Radio 6 Music were also only negotiated for the UK. It costs hundreds of pounds in music rights to play a single record on Radio 2 - but that money only covers music rights in the UK, and not overseas.
The generally accepted rules for music radio’s payment of international music rights are that if your radio station a) is not marketed in a country other than yours, and b) you don’t earn revenue from that country, then you aren’t liable for additional music rights in that country. On the South Coast of England, you can often get radio stations from France - but because they’re not marketed to UK listeners, nor earning money from them, they have no music fees to pay for the UK.
In 2017, TuneIn lost a landmark court ruling, and lost again in the Court of Appeal in 2021. That clarified the law that since TuneIn was marketing radio stations to a new country, and earning money from them, they were liable for music rights payments in that country.
This is clearly something that BBC Studios doesn’t want. Paying for music rights worldwide is prohibitively expensive; and also there’s no guarantee that the terms would be the same, thus causing issues for the domestic broadcasts. (As one example - US music licensing contracts require that you can’t broadcast more than four tracks from the same artist in a three hour period. There’s no such rule in the UK.) That contract also requires accurate reports, both of songs played but also exact listener numbers - something which could add significant work.
It’s easier for BBC Studios to give access to BBC Radio 4 and BBC World Service (two stations they own effectively all the rights for), where they are free to monetise these by using ad banners, audio advertising and even subscription.
Why aren’t they communicating all this?
A few reasons - first, perhaps one of legal liability (they probably don’t want 25 years of music rights payments), and also because if they do communicate too clearly how to find BBC domestic music radio, then they could be claimed as marketing those stations, and therefore have to pay the music rights fees.
The BBC is, in short, delicately tiptoeing through this issue. It would be easy for them to turn off BBC music radio entirely overseas. It’s lucky for us that they aren’t doing that.