How To Get Your Music On The Radio

We will be talking soon about various ways for independent bands and artists to sell their music online. Selling your music is only part of the process however. First of all, people need to be aware of your music. They actually need to hear it somewhere.

These days it’s not hard to knock up a quick website or mySpace page to help you, but once again, how do people find you in the first place? One of the best tools for promoting and selling music has traditionally been radio. Getting air play on a radio station has many obvious advantages. You can take advantage of a far wider audience than you would normally get to your mySpace page or your website and you can “piggy back” on the success of other bands being played.

We all know what decent airplay can give us, but how do we go about getting our music played? Well, the old fashioned way was to get hold of a mailing list of radio stations then set about putting together hundreds of press kits and CD packages to mail out. This method still works but it is expensive and many of the packages you send out will end up in the bin. Some won’t suit the station, some don’t accept songs from labels that aren’t “majors”, some will throw it away without even opening it but some, just a few maybe, may play your stuff. It’s not really a great system, eh?

Once again, the internet has come to the rescue of the independent musician.

Full list of sections in this chapter:

• Preparing Your Music For Airplay
  

  While sites like Airplay Direct have been an absolute gold mine of great music, I’ve found that many of the artists still do not make it easy for me, as a producer, to use their music. How are they making it hard for me? The main problems are:

  Poor levels. Some are far too quiet and [...]

• Get Your Music On The Radio – Airplay Direct
  

  Airplay Direct is a great new service that acts as a “middleman” in getting artists and radio stations together. You simply sign up for an account which allows you to upload some of your songs in broadcastquality
  mp3 format. Radio stations can then come along and search Airplay Direct for material appropriate to their particular station. [...]

• Get Your Music On The Radio – Live365
  

  Live365 is the World’s largest internet radio network, boasting somewhere around 5,000 radio stations. My station, www.AllAustralianMusic.com is hosted on Live365. They allow amateur and professional DJ’s the ability to set up high quality radio stations that broadcast across the internet 24/7.
  Here’s a quote from their site:

  “Use the world’s largest independent internet radio network to [...]