Webcasting from Hamilton, ON · 24 hours · no adverts
All music
all the time
on a digital device near you
A continuous web broadcast running through over fifty decades of music — from the earliest shellac in the crate to records that came out last month. One signal, day and night, with a standing bias toward Canadian and independent artists: the stuff that never made the chart, the stuff that should have, and the stuff nobody thought to press twice.
Curated by Gary St-Laurent, who has spent a very long time in Montreal dive-bars deciding what plays next. No algorithm, no skip button, no host explaining the song to you afterwards.
Off air — moving to a new stream server. Back before the end of the month.
Listen
The station is off air while we move to a new stream server. Nothing is lost — the records are all still here, the signal just needs a new pipe. The stream comes back before the end of the month, and when it does you press play and leave it on. Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for.
What you'll hear: songs you forgot about. The B-side you wore out at seventeen, the one-hit that vanished after a summer, the album track that never got a video, the thing that used to come on in a bar and make the whole room go quiet for three minutes. Sixties garage next to a brand-new Bandcamp release next to a record you haven't thought about since high school. The through-line isn't genre or era — it's that every record earns its place, and most of them were never supposed to be remembered.
How it works
- One stream. A single continuous feed. You join wherever it happens to be — once it's back up.
- Now playing, always. The line at the top of the page shows the record that's on right now — no guessing what you walked in on.
- No skipping. The record plays out. That's the format.
- No account. No email, no login, no cookie wall.
- Low bandwidth. Built to survive a bad connection.
- Canadian first. Independent always. If a major label owns it, it has to be very good to get on.
Webcasting from Hamilton, Ontario — the signal has gone out from there in one form or another since Radio POP Montreal in 2004. Curated by Gary St-Laurent.
About
Infringement Radio exists because listening to music shouldn't require decisions. No queue to build, no taste profile to maintain, no recommendation engine quietly narrowing what you hear.
It's a broadcast in the old sense: one signal, many listeners, all hearing the same thing at the same moment. That shared clock is the whole point. When a record lands at 2am, it lands for everyone at once.
The name is a joke about how most of this music got into the world in the first place — borrowed, copied, passed hand to hand, and better for it.
Curated by Gary St-Laurent, a legendary Montreal bar guy — the kind of bartender who runs the music himself, from a corner of the room, and has never once used the word "playlist." Decades of watching a dive-bar room decide what it wanted next is the entire programming philosophy here. If a record can hold a room at 11pm on a Tuesday in February, it can hold a stream.
The range is deliberate: over fifty decades, from the oldest thing in the collection to something released this month. The organising principle is memory — records that were huge once and then disappeared, records that never got their turn, records you'd only ever hear in a bar at closing time. Canadian artists and independent labels get the front of the queue, because they're the ones who need a station like this most.
The signal goes out from Hamilton, Ontario, and has in one form or another since Radio POP Montreal in 2004 — the same idea carried through every server, every room and every format since: one person picking records, no committee, no algorithm, no one to tell you what to like. Twenty-odd years of it, and the crate has only got deeper.
Get in touch
Requests, guest slots, songs you're sure we've forgotten, or a complaint about something played at 4am. All of it lands in the same inbox — and while the stream is down, this is the only way to reach the station, so use it.
Musicians and labels: send a link, not a file. If it's Canadian, independent, and good, it has a real chance of going on air — and Gary will tell you when it does.
Or write straight to [email address].