Us as musicians and artists, record labels or promoters all at some point send to radio. Much has changed since the hey days of radio as you probably already know unless you’ve been on a desert island somewhere listening to your favourite selection of music!
We all know that radio pretty much led the way for pop music exposure for several decades before succumbing to a more powerful medium emerging in the late 1990’s called The Internet. So what’s different now? – We had ‘Pirate radio’ in the 60’s and 70’s in the forefront of popular music along with the shiny new BBC service radios 1 – 4.
The BBC had no choice other than setting up a new pop station back then because of public demand, so many thought that a new wave of small radio stations starting to broadcast on the worldwide web today may well repeat the similar explosion we witnessed all those decades ago. But will it? – I believe this can only happen if new radio spins new Indie label music in among the majors as they used to do.
Artists like Bob Marley, Kylie Minogue, Jimi Hendrix and even Jacko and Elvis would all be tarred ‘unsigned’ if we have had the same attitude back in the day when new music was rife and the Indie labels provided the new emerging acts.
When I released records in the 1980’s there was a standard way of promoting them to radio, the clubs or both, where the record label manufactured white labels and these were fairly plain looking giveaways all earmarked to encourage radio or club play depending on the genre of music.
The club DJ or radio presenters received the record itself, a short press release about the act with the release date and a reaction sheet. This reaction sheet had a short list of questions asking about audience reaction. For example if the track was aimed at clubs the DJ would be asked what time it was played, was it played more than once and did the dance floor fill up or did the night clubbers leave the floor during its duration?
Happy Radio?