Quick tip 104 Radio

Radio play is one of those magical ingredients in the business. Traditionally new bands were made famous through radio. Today things have changed a lot. I suppose I was part of the generation, who started to slip away from the radio. Growing up I had a boom box that had a radio, but for some reason, most of the stuff that came out of the radio did not appeal to me, so I ended up listening to my own music collection.

But we still believe radio play is part of the key to success. So lets break one myth right here right now. As an independent artist, you will never get enough radio play to make large amount of money! The mainstream radio is controlled by the record labels, full stop. And they will never give you enough play time for you to make crap load of money, unless they get a cut out of it. If at this point your instinct is to say “Yeah, but what if…” you are wasting!

Still, there is value in radio, especially the independent radio and online radio. I have actually managed to get surprisingly many stations to play my music in the past year and a half. How did I do it? First of all, I purchased The Indie Bible, and went through their radio station lists. I utilised few gigs on Fiverr.com and I spent few weeks on the Google doing my research on radio shows who might play independent music. I contacted them all. As a result I got a handful of stations to play my songs.

After this, I moved on. I had blog posts to write, songs to write, record and sing, website and social media to manage, gigs to play. For me to cry about not getting enough radio play would not help anybody… Then as my following started to grow, something started to happen. I started to get messages on Twitter from radio presenters and shows asking for tracks. Now, I get at least one radio station a week asking me for tracks 🙂

This just proves again the importance of Twitter for the independent artists.

J.P.

The author J.P. Kallio is a singer songwriter
To get EIGHT of his songs for free go HERE