You're on the radio out of your market, now what?

So I recently was talking to Shane Sauers of Miss Massive Snowflake on North Pole Records about how things are going with his new record as I’d seen in the charts at a few stations.  He told me, “Yeah, it’s getting some airplay in Michigan & stuff, but now what am I supposed to do?”  Because he’s in Portland, Oregon & the odds of him doing a tour of the scale to get to Michigan is asking a bit much.  So I thought I’d throw out some of my general ideas on the subject & things I sometimes do & maybe should always do because I imagine a lot of people are in the same boat.

1. Thank the music director for their interest & support.
2. Try to track down & contact individual DJs at the station that would be into the release to let them know it’s at the station & that they would dig it.
3. Offer to get the band to do station IDs or PSAs.
4. Ask the music director if there are any local music shops you should try to get your disc in stock at.  If they have answers, contact the record stores letting them know it’s in rotation at the station & where they can get the stuff to stock at the store.
5. After building a bit of conversation with an MD offer an on air telephone interview if it seems reasonable.
6. Offer sending a few copies of the disc for on air give aways.
7. If it’s a college station, try to find out about a campus gig.  These gigs sometimes pay enough to finance a whole tour & often need to be booked fairly far in advance & you can build a tour around them.
8. If some of the previous things have worked out & things seem to be going well, offer a virtual radio session (either demos or live recordings that you send the station a CD-R of).
9. Spread the word to your fanbase that they can hear your stuff on that station’s live stream & can request stuff off the disc while their listening.
10. A lot of college music directors go on to do other things in the music industry, so while you have their attention, it’s important to honestly build a relationship with them.  Today’s MD could be tomorrow’s music supervisor.

Brian John Mitchell runs Silber Records & records under the Remora moniker.  He has a blog about running a label that this article is lifted from.

Comments

[Justin Boland]

Good stuff! Short and potent, I dig it.