How to Get Your Music on the Radio

Video Transcript

"FREDERICK BURCHELL: Hello. My name is Frederick "Ricky B." Burchell with B4 Entertainment on behalf of Expert Village, and today we're going to talk about producing, manufacturing, marketing, and distributing your independent CD. Now, let's talk about radio play. Now, radio play is so important when selling a record. I always say the best way to sell a product is the product. So you gotta get your music heard. You gotta get to people out there on the radio. A lot of times, people are driving down, they turn on the radio, they hear a new song and, they're like, "Man, what is that?" Then they end up going an internet search for it or go to a store and say, "Hey, I heard a song and it went like this." So it's so important to get your songs on the radio. Now, how do you that? Now, radio could probably be one of the hardest things to overcome. For certain types of genres it's like it's super hard to get on the radio. But what you gotta do, you gotta know who to give the music to. A lot of times, people will just give the music to the DJs. That's okay but that doesn't get you radio play. They ask--all right, the DJ has your song, your CD or your single or whatever it's okay to have that. But the person you need to get your CD to is the program director. That's the person who decides what music gets on a radio station. Sometimes, you're going to have to make a call and bug him, "Hey, did you get the song? Did you get the CD?" But you gotta make sure, it gets in the hands of the program director so that he makes--'cause he makes the choice on what CD gets played--what song gets played or not. So that's the important thing is sometimes, you may have to call. There's people out here that have them do radio servicing and already have a relationship with different program directors and you may need to call them and hire them and say, "Hey, I heard you do radio servicing in this type of genre of music. Can you do my radio servicing?" And since they already have a relationship with the program director, it's a whole lot easier for them to make a phone call. They may even have the cellphone of the program director. They will call the program director and say, "Hey, I got this new single. I want you to check it out." If you don't have a budget to hire radio servicing, what I suggest is call the radio station, find out who the program director is, get his e-mail, e-mail him, bug him, call him, keep calling, and make sure he hears your record. But the person you need to let--hear the record, like I said, is the program director."