Music Funding 101
You Can't View Radio The Way You THINK It Works
Since my radio airplay promotion business began in 1998, we have been selling radio airplay promotion campaigns to indie bands. I'm all too familiar with how people think radio airplay works (and I'm not speaking here about radio ads). This of course was the reason for putting the 60+ articles about radio airplay on our Radio-Media.com site. But new bands which have not had time to investigate this yet, and certainly new sponsors who are looking into this for the first time, will benefit from a short TalentFunding.com introduction into the realities of radio airplay.
The main point that must be understood about radio is that the people working in radio are told to make it look like it works one way, but in reality, radio works in an almost exactly opposite way. No other area of the music business does this. And since radio (and other new audio services which are controlled by humans) is the primary mass-media exposure mechanism to get a single song to many people, I'll give you the basic frame of mind that you need to have when thinking about radio.
[Note: Unless you are an independent airplay promotion person, or a staff promotion person at a label who spends at least $25,000 to promote a single song, then you are not in a position to counter my opinion here. This means that if you are getting your information from magazines, sites, newspapers, bands, indie labels, radio station personnel, or anyone else other than an independent or staff radio airplay promotion person, then you are probably not getting the information you need to form the proper opinion yourself.]
The first and biggest current misconception is that radio is "controlled" by major labels who are "paying" stations to play only "crappy" music. Since you may be thinking this very thought right now, you are probably thinking that you can't get songs onto the radio yourself. This is exactly how is does NOT work. The reason that most music on big stations comes from major labels is because only the majors can do the amount of marketing that is required. Indie labels (even the big indies) don't have the money to pay for the marketing manpower that is required. (That is, unless they have sponsors.) An analogy: It's easy to make soda pop, and consumers SHOULD buy the best tasting one, but we all know how many choices there really are at the store, restaurant, or on the airline. This is because it takes great marketing power to get the product out there, and only a few companies can do it. Thus, there are thousands of independent soda's out there that you have never heard of. The same goes for perfume, toys, and fast food: They are cheap to make, and expensive to market.
The second most misunderstood point (it used to be the first) is that DJs pick the music that is played. This ended in the 1970s, and is simply a function of building radio as a business. In a manner similar to how mom-and-pop restaurants converted to franchises, radio began keeping the song-control to a single person per station. This way, a station could play a song more than once a day, because otherwise, each DJ would purposely choose songs that nobody else played much.
This, by the way, is how you create a commercial hit: the same song is played repeatedly by all stations at the same time. And this can only be accomplished if each station's playlist is controlled by only one person at each station. And this works to your advantage because if you have the marketing power, you become part of this system and your song becomes a "hit" too.
The third misunderstood point is that radio (especially commercial) only wants to play "crap" or "watered down" songs from bands with no talent. There are several answers I could reply with, most of which would take hours (and all are based on marketing), but the short answer is hopefully good news to you: the song with the best marketing (done properly) is going to be the one that radio plays, period. And a sponsor is what is required in order to have good marketing.
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