How do you get your stuff on the radio?
As a new band, especially an indie band, it's not easy. You can mail a couple thousand dollars worth of CDs out to radio stations along with a perfect promo kit and pray they play your stuff. You can hoof it from station to station, trying to catch the DJs that play in your genre and talk them into taking a listen. You can submit to airplay listings on Taxi or SonicBids -- but somehow paying money to get your song run once over the airwaves doesn't seem economical, unless you've got plenty of dough-re-me to pour into it.
Fortunately there is an ever-increasing array of resources out there for small, independent, niche, or up-and-coming musicians. One I particularly love is RadioDirectX. No, I'm not a salesperson--I'm a very satisfied customer. You'll pay a couple hundred bucks to set up your radio music release with RadioDirectX, but they have a whole mess of release options to choose from. Basically, you send them your music, and they put it out with a weekly release, making it available to station programmers and DJs around the world, flagged for your genre of music. You can opt to release the music in digital form only--so you don't have to pay postage mailing CDs to every station that requests it--or via CD and digital release. For digital releases, the programmers who want your track simply lift it from the RadioDirectX site. For hard copy releases, they email you a note on your RadioDirectX artist page, and you mail them a disc.
Well over 95% of the programmers and DJs who take one of your tracks then plays it on the air, and lets you know when and where it was played. Rather than mailing discs into a black hole where they will never be heard again, you have nearly complete efficiency here.
And here's the real prize: In exchange for their getting free access to the music releases, the DJs and programmers who select your stuff off of RadioDirectX will email you back a review or comment on your music. You can then use these reviews and comments in your promo kits, advertising, websites, you name it.
My band O'hAnleigh is a genre group that plays in several niches: Irish-American organizations, festival and pubs; historical events like history expos and civil war re-enactments; and an array of music festivals, coffeehouses, dinners, weddings and so on. We are from a tiny corner of Vermont. But within a couple months of releasing our first CD on RadioDirectX, we were being played on folk and world music programs literally all over the world, from Australia to Belarus to Israel and India to Venezuela. We got a world map and stuck it on foam board and set it up at our gigs with pins in it at all the locations our music was being played. And we turned the incredible feedback we got into a sheet of quotes that we include in our promo kits. Some of the best quotes we put on stickers and stuck on our CD cases when they went out for sale. And the contacts we made with these DJs and programmers didn't end there, we got emails much later asking us when our next CD was coming out and making sure we were going to send it along. We even got contacted to do live radio interviews and special promotions. We recorded tag lines for several of the stations, and sent along signed posters for the DJs to hang up in their booths.
I'm sure there must be other services out there similar to RadioDirectX, and by all means take a look and see what other options are available. This just happens to be the one I'm familiar with, and I must say that -- a rarity in this increasingly expensive and often negative world that seems intent on exploiting musicians -- we really got more than our money's worth out of these folks.
Catch you on the airwaves--
Cindy
As a new band, especially an indie band, it's not easy. You can mail a couple thousand dollars worth of CDs out to radio stations along with a perfect promo kit and pray they play your stuff. You can hoof it from station to station, trying to catch the DJs that play in your genre and talk them into taking a listen. You can submit to airplay listings on Taxi or SonicBids -- but somehow paying money to get your song run once over the airwaves doesn't seem economical, unless you've got plenty of dough-re-me to pour into it.
Fortunately there is an ever-increasing array of resources out there for small, independent, niche, or up-and-coming musicians. One I particularly love is RadioDirectX. No, I'm not a salesperson--I'm a very satisfied customer. You'll pay a couple hundred bucks to set up your radio music release with RadioDirectX, but they have a whole mess of release options to choose from. Basically, you send them your music, and they put it out with a weekly release, making it available to station programmers and DJs around the world, flagged for your genre of music. You can opt to release the music in digital form only--so you don't have to pay postage mailing CDs to every station that requests it--or via CD and digital release. For digital releases, the programmers who want your track simply lift it from the RadioDirectX site. For hard copy releases, they email you a note on your RadioDirectX artist page, and you mail them a disc.
Well over 95% of the programmers and DJs who take one of your tracks then plays it on the air, and lets you know when and where it was played. Rather than mailing discs into a black hole where they will never be heard again, you have nearly complete efficiency here.
And here's the real prize: In exchange for their getting free access to the music releases, the DJs and programmers who select your stuff off of RadioDirectX will email you back a review or comment on your music. You can then use these reviews and comments in your promo kits, advertising, websites, you name it.
My band O'hAnleigh is a genre group that plays in several niches: Irish-American organizations, festival and pubs; historical events like history expos and civil war re-enactments; and an array of music festivals, coffeehouses, dinners, weddings and so on. We are from a tiny corner of Vermont. But within a couple months of releasing our first CD on RadioDirectX, we were being played on folk and world music programs literally all over the world, from Australia to Belarus to Israel and India to Venezuela. We got a world map and stuck it on foam board and set it up at our gigs with pins in it at all the locations our music was being played. And we turned the incredible feedback we got into a sheet of quotes that we include in our promo kits. Some of the best quotes we put on stickers and stuck on our CD cases when they went out for sale. And the contacts we made with these DJs and programmers didn't end there, we got emails much later asking us when our next CD was coming out and making sure we were going to send it along. We even got contacted to do live radio interviews and special promotions. We recorded tag lines for several of the stations, and sent along signed posters for the DJs to hang up in their booths.
I'm sure there must be other services out there similar to RadioDirectX, and by all means take a look and see what other options are available. This just happens to be the one I'm familiar with, and I must say that -- a rarity in this increasingly expensive and often negative world that seems intent on exploiting musicians -- we really got more than our money's worth out of these folks.
Catch you on the airwaves--
Cindy
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