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In 2015, NTS expanded, opening a studio in Manchester and one in Los Angeles the following year. Currently, NTS hosts around 700 shows a month \u2014 roughly 600 from residents, who host weekly, biweekly or monthly shows, and 100 or so from guest D.J.s \u2014 which come in from cities across the world, including Beirut, Lebanon; Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; and Melbourne, Australia. NTS broadcasts without advertising, instead relying on income from its commercial activities and a membership program called \u201cNTS Supporters<\/a>\u201d to keep the station afloat. In March, the station averaged 360,000 listeners a day, according to its chief executive, Sean McAuliffe.<\/p>\n Tabitha Thorlu-Bangura, the director of music and programming at NTS, said that the station \u201cwas the first platform in London that really reflected the breadth\u201d of her taste as a young Black music fan with a genre-agnostic mind-set. It was that boundary-dissolving character that brings people to the station, she added.<\/p>\n Dill said the station could also act as a bulwark against the idea that listening to music is a passive experience. \u201cI want people to not think that music is just a background thing that\u2019s on Spotify, that rolls into the next song and they all sound vaguely the same,\u201d she said. (Around 40 percent of the music played on NTS is not available on the streaming service, McAuliffe noted.) \u201cI want people to think that music is a really valuable, amazing art form, like a painting or a sculpture,\u201d Dill added.<\/p>\n Although it is based in London, NTS has global appeal. Nabihah Iqbal, who has been broadcasting on NTS for over a decade, said that she once received a message from a man in the Nubian Desert who listened to her show from the one spot in his Sudanese village where he could get cell signal.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat NTS reflects is the way that music consumption and connecting through music has changed because of the internet,\u201d she said. \u201cListening to the station live, and being part of the chat room and connecting to people that way is a very real way of feeling like you\u2019re part of a community.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n