How do you get played on the radio!

Research suggests, that radio is still the biggest format for music consumption, globally, thus it remains a powerful format for breaking through, if you, however, can find your way to the relevant radios.

Radios is a lot of things, there is large commercial radio, some are government funded, and some are run by big companies, and some are community driven or even run on charity. All with different musical agendas.

Many big commercial radios, often plays either oldies, classics and evergreens or the latest top50 locally and often across many genres.

On the other hand, community driven radios, are often much more independent minded and/or specialized in their music curation. This could be college radios, or genre specific which can be difficult to locate, in other countries.

To maximize your chance of getting played on the radio, both locally and internationally, it’s worth to do some research about what radios are relevant to you. The solution for this, is to understand which radios, are playing music similar yours. Usually artist sand labels, has some idea of similar and bigger artists or songs. By monitoring these, you will quickly be able to find ideal radios to pitch your music too.

You would be surprised to see how many radios internationally are playing niche music. These radios, often have very dedicated audiences within a particular scope of genres.

Things to remember:

• Music is consumed differently in different countries and some countries have a lot stronger radio culture than others.
• Many independent radios are run by people who love music; thus they are usually open for international music, rather than only local music.
• With the help of streaming services and social media, new music is discovered by gatekeepers all the time, regardless of origin.
• +95% of radios, broadcast online regardless if terrestrial or not,, which mean they can be accessed from anywhere in the world. (Mytuner-radio.com and Radio.garden are great examples of this)

The amount of listeners on a radio is obviously a factor, but arguably it is more relevant to know, if it is a dedicated audience or not and the amount of songs you get played.

I would argue that it is much more valuable to get played on a rock radio, with a dedicated rock audience, if you have a rock song 10 x 10.000 listeners, than it is to get 1 spin on a big commercial radio with 1.000.000 listeners.

Luckily with WARM, you can monitor any songs of your choice, with this feature you can monitor similar songs, compared to a particular song about to be released. This way you can quite easily find the most relevant radios to promote your music to.

With WARM, all airplay detections are delivered in real time, and the coverage is build by our clients, which help us monitor the most relevant radios, and update the coverage of radios, around the world.