Once in a while, my husband and I have been known to make wise family decisions and this was one of our best: we took the TV sets out of the entire first floor of our house, wanting to spend a bit more time in conversation (remember that?) with our kids and a bit more time listening to music. Well, the conversation has been scintillating (mostly) and the addition of an iPad made the music-listening part easier. And recently, a website (and new app) called TuneIn has made Music Appreciation 101 much easier.

TuneIn lets you listen to streaming audio from over 70,000 radio
stations from all over the world, along with 2 million podcasts and
other on-demand programs. And hey, you can’t go wrong if TIME magazine
has just ranked this as one of their 50 Best Websites of 2012, right?

TuneIn
is totally free and super easy to navigate. Within five minutes I had found
dozens of stations with my own particular brand of music awesomeness, 70’s love songs (I know, I know, lame); my husband’s vice (80’s rock);
Michael Jackson Radio for my dancing 7-year old son; and a huge
selection of kids’ station, including Kids Public Radio (who knew such a
thing existed?)

for my darling daughter.

Plus the TuneIn app is available on over 200
different devices—car dashboard, smartphones, smart TVs, home audio systems and more–so you
can hear your favorite music, news and sports content from basically anything that can connect to the Internet.

Today I listened to a comedy podcast from the UK and some Australian hip-hop. I’m feeling very tuned in, dontchaknow. — Shari

Listen to TuneIn on the web or download the app for free.