Nostalgia playlists and "on this day" pages give you songs or facts one at a time. Old radio archives exist for a few famous stations, mostly in rich countries. Hometown Radio reconstructs a whole station for one town and one year, the way it flowed: jingle, news, weather, adverts, music and a DJ who talks to your parent by name. It is made to be gifted.
The data it runs on
News: Wikipedia "year in country" and "year in city" pages (for example "1979 in Nigeria"), read through the Wikipedia API and checked against Wikidata events with dates. Only events that appear in both make the bulletin.
Weather: climate normals for the month (ERA5 reanalysis via Open-Meteo's historical API), presented as "typical for the season", not as that day's forecast.
Music: genre and era descriptions from Wikipedia and MusicBrainz tags for the country and decade. Audio is newly generated in the style, never a real recording or song.
Ads and slang: public-domain and openly licensed ad archives describe the products and tone of the era; our ads are for generic, fictional products.
Limits and gaps: smaller towns often have no year page, so the bulletin falls back to national news; local slang and languages need care.
Fallback: if a town has thin coverage, the station broadcasts as the nearest big city's station, and the family can add their own memories as "listener calls".
1. The mission
Give everyone a way to hear the world their parents were young in. A full radio hour from their hometown in the year they turned 18, made in minutes, gifted with love.
2. Why people can't resist it
The reminiscence bump. We remember our late teens more vividly than any other time. This app aims right at it.
Being named. When the DJ says "this one is for Adaeze on Ikorodu Road", parents laugh, then cry, then call.
A gift that is about them. Easy to give, impossible to buy anywhere else.
3. How it works for real
Research: a fast cheap model (Gemini Flash or DeepSeek via OpenRouter) pulls dated events from the Wikipedia year pages and keeps only general, verifiable headlines.
Script: a frontier LLM (Claude or GPT) writes the running order: jingle, DJ links, a news bulletin, weather, era-style adverts for generic products, music introductions, all in the voice of the place.
Fact check: each headline is checked against a second source; anything unclear is cut, never softened.
Voice: TTS with accent-matched voices (ElevenLabs or OpenAI TTS), lightly processed to sound like an AM radio.
Music: a music model (such as Stable Audio or a similar licensed generator) makes original instrumentals in the style, for example "late 1970s highlife guitar". No real songs.
Mix: a simple audio pipeline adds tuning static, jingles and crossfades into one hour.
4. Cost per use
About $1 per station hour, cached: around $0.05 of writing, $0.40 of voice and $0.50 of music. The same town and year is reused for every family that asks, with only the dedications regenerated.
Free: a 10 minute station with text-to-speech in the browser. Gift ($4 per station): the full hour with real voices and music, a gift card and a link that works on any phone. Family ($6 a month): unlimited stations, request line, monthly "new episode".
5. Growth loop
Every gift is a link that plays the station for the parent, and ends with "make one for someone you love". Parents share it with their siblings and old school friends, who then ask for their own year.
Every Sunday the same station returns with "This week in 1979" (or whatever their year is): a new hour for that week of the year, plus fresh dedications from relatives. Each episode stays on the family's archive shelf, so the collection grows and brings more relatives back to add their voice.
6. Risks and guardrails
Truth: only general, double-sourced historical events; no invented news, no real people's quotes.
Hard years: wars, coups and disasters are reported plainly and briefly, with an option to make a "music and memories" edition without the news.
Copyright: no real songs, jingles or station names. Music is original and labelled as a style.
Voices: no cloning of real DJs or family members without recorded consent.
7. MVP build order
Year-page scraper plus a headline checker for 20 town and year pairs.
Script prompt that outputs a running order as JSON.
Browser TTS player with a radio dial and equalizer.
Gift card link and the "Tune in" landing page for the parent.
Paid tier with real voices and generated music, cached per town and year.