Lately I've discovered the magic of stream ripping and I've been searching Shoutcast to find stations that play mostly hits of the 80's 90's and 00's with high-bandwidth and clean gaps.

I've noticed an interesting phenomenon. The vast majority of high bandwidth stations - 320kbps or 256 kbps - seem to play similar music. Most of the stations seem to be European and they mostly seem to play 120 beat-per-minute club or dance-mix synth-pop music.

When you get to the lower bandwidths like 128 kbps you get more variety - "classic rock", metal, folk, soul, ska, reggae, top-40 adult contemporary, etc. But that's too low-bandwidth for me. So my question is - is club or dance-mix synth-pop music mostly what people are listening to these days in Europe? Or is there some other reason why that style of music seems to dominate the higher-bandwidth internet radio streams?

Thanks in advance for any insights!

What plays on high-bit rate internet radio is only indicative of what plays on high-bandwidth internet radio. I don't know what the European version of the Billboard charts is, but those would be more indicative of what the population as a whole is listening to.

I think it's because those into dance, trance and the likes are more aware of the medium, they push higher quality streams and they are a big (I'm not saying bigger) listener base undoubtly, and therefore it's more common with high-bandwidth stream for this kind of music. Also that music has a lot of samples in the upper frequency range which just sound that much better when you have decent quality internet radio. Other type of music might be more forgiving in that respect.

And classical music lacks the listener base to even have a vote.

But the US isn't that bad. take a look at http://www.di.fm
And another great trance/progressive station is http://www.etn.fm

And yes I'm a trance addict myself.