How to get your music on the radio

Getting your song on the radio means reaching the people who choose what a station plays, and making sure the song can be identified and paid for once it's on air. For an independent artist, the way in is usually college and community radio, specialist shows and internet radio, with commercial stations further along. Each kind of station finds music differently.

This guide covers how stations choose songs, how to approach them, and what has to be in place behind the scenes: the databases that identify a song and the registrations that pay you for airplay. It's part of how to get more listeners, the guide to every way a new song reaches people.

How radio stations choose what to play

At most stations, a music director decides which new songs go into rotation, often with a program director who sets the station's sound. They hear new music from labels, radio promoters (people paid to pitch songs to stations) and artists who write to them. They pick what fits their listeners and the shows they run.

Stations differ in how open they are to an artist they haven't heard of:

• College radio is run largely by students and volunteers, and many stations play independent and local music on purpose. Their charts are where a lot of new artists get their first spins.
• Community radio runs on volunteers and local shows, each with its own host who often picks the music.
• Specialist shows on bigger stations cover one genre or scene, from metal to jazz to new local music, and their hosts look for new songs to play.
• Commercial radio plays a tighter list, often set centrally for a group of stations. Most songs reach it through a label or a radio promoter, after building a following elsewhere.

How to approach a station or a show

Start with stations and shows that already play music like yours. Listen, find the show, and look on the station's website for who to write to and how they want music sent. Many college stations list their music director and their submission rules.

Then write a short email to one person, by name:

• a line about who you are and where you're from;
• a few lines about the song: its sound, the story, why it fits their show;
• a streaming link, and a download link if they ask for files;
• the song's length, and a note if it has explicit lyrics, since many stations need a clean version.

Keep attachments out of a first email unless the station asks for them. A link to your electronic press kit puts your bio, photos and links in one place, and a good artist bio gives a host something to say on air. Follow up once, politely, and thank anyone who plays the song, publicly when you can. A host who played one song is more likely to listen to your next.

Internet radio, Pandora and streaming radio

Internet radio covers a lot: online stations run like traditional ones, station apps such as iHeartRadio, and services that build stations from listening.

Pandora is one of the best known in the US. It takes music from distributors, and its help center sets out the path. First, send your music to Pandora through a distributor, with Pandora selected and US streaming rights granted. Then claim your artist account in Pandora AMP. Pandora's Music Genome Project analyzes each track for up to 450 musical attributes, so listeners can start a station from your song and Pandora can play it on stations built around similar artists.

Streaming services have radio of their own too. Spotify's radio and autoplay pick songs from listening, the same signals behind Discover Weekly and the Spotify algorithm.

How a song is identified on air

A song that plays on the radio or in a car is identified by matching it against a database. Two names come up most.

• Gracenote is a music database, owned by Nielsen, that many car screens and media players use to show what's playing: the title, the artist and the cover.
• Shazam identifies a song from a few seconds of audio when a listener holds up their phone. It's owned by Apple, and an artist image you set in Apple Music for Artists also shows on Shazam.

A song that's in these databases shows up correctly when someone hears it and wants to know what it is. That's how a listener on the road finds the song afterward on the service they use. Clean metadata matters here as much as anywhere: song credits and metadata covers each field.

Getting paid for airplay

When a song is played on the radio, the station pays performance royalties for the composition, which reach songwriters and publishers through performing rights organizations. Register your songs with a performing rights organization in your country, such as ASCAP or BMI in the US, PRS in the UK or SOCAN in Canada, and list every writer and their share. Stations report what they play, and the organization matches those plays to the songs registered with it.

Registration is separate from distribution. Your distributor delivers the recording and collects from the stores; the songwriting side is registered by the writers, or by their publisher.

What Audora does for radio

Audora puts every release into the databases radio stations, cars and song recognition read, Gracenote and Shazam among them, alongside Spotify, Apple Music, TikTok, YouTube and 140+ stores, Pandora included.

• The words and pictures a host needs. Cover art, a bio in three lengths and a logo, made to the stores' spec, with full commercial rights to everything made.
• The credits. Every writer, performer and producer on the track, delivered with the release, so the right names travel with the song.
• A campaign around the release. Posts planned around release day, each written in your voice with its caption, hashtags and the picture or video it needs. You approve what goes out.

TikTok, YouTube, Instagram (Stories included) and Facebook Pages post automatically, and nothing goes out until you approve it. Stories carry no link sticker, so your release link goes in your bio.

The exact steps for your release, dated to its release day, are in your Audora account. We keep improving them, adding, dropping and retiming steps as we see what works best for our artists. What every track gets lays out the full release.