Radio :: 20/20 Vision

Hi guys, today we're going to talk about radio play. And you know, in 2020, radio is still relevant. And I have to admit to you that I thought it would be long gone by now, but it's not. It's still a very effective way to reach a very large amount of people. The downside is it's extremely expensive. And it can be a little difficult because it depends on how crowded radio is. The way that radio works is you hire an independent radio promotion person, and then that person leverages their relationships and their contacts to get you radio play at different radio stations. It's always easier to get, um, radio play in the Southeast. Um, it just is. It always has been. So if you start in the Southeast, that's an amazing region to actually start getting your radio play. For me, that's a wonderful thing because most of my clients, we're targeting the Southeast. And the reason we're targeting the Southeast is because you don't have to be super famous for fans to listen to your music and support your music, attend your shows, buy your merch. So you don't have to be a superstar. You don't have to be Jay-Z or, um, Juice WRLD in order for fans to support you in the Southeast. You can be an up-and-coming artist and fans will embrace you, and that's what makes the South such a wonderful marketplace. If you, if you have been watching all of my 2020 visions, you know that we are working a 5-hour driving radius around your location. So if you're based in Atlanta, that is Northern Florida, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, um, into Tennessee and Mississippi. Um, I tend to go almost 6 hours out because I want Jackson, Mississippi included. It's a great market. And then that includes all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. And we work from Richmond south to about Tampa. So it's a little bit— for, for my clients, and my clients all have bigger budgets, um, they work a little bit bigger of a target area. And the great thing about radio is that with in the confines of the areas that I just told you, there's enough stations to get millions of audience on a song. When I go for radio, I make sure that I've got a, um, a foundation built. So I've already been working the song. I never take a song to radio that isn't already, um, popping a little bit at radio, meaning in mix show. Um, I do not usually go for mix show play. I usually go right for rotation, but there are some songs where it makes sense to go for mix show. And if you don't understand any of the terms that I'm using, please do the research to understand, because that's important. At radio for rap, there's 3 different formats that kind of matter. Urban is the initial one that we like to hit, followed by rhythmic, followed by pop. Urban is music that's a little bit more street, so, um, it's, it's rap that isn't quite crossing over yet. Rhythmic is a little bit more rap that's crossing over. It's a little bit more melodic, it's a little bit more mainstream. And then pop, of course, is mainstream. And you go from urban to rhythmic to pop, you don't go from pop to rhythmic to urban. So you start at urban and you go up. You don't go backwards. You don't start at rhythmic and spread out. You start at urban and you go up if you're trying to hit all three formats. Not every song makes sense, and this is where your independent radio promotion person can really be helpful because they're going to tell you what's best for the song, not necessarily what's best for you. Right? So you— this is an area where you can lose a lot of money. There's a lot of radio promo people out here that don't really grasp how to create a career for a rapper. They know how to break music at radio, but they don't necessarily know how to monetize an artist or do what's best for an artist. So you've got to hire somebody that really understands the entire process. In addition to that, you can't just go to a radio guy and say, here's $20 grand or $30 grand, go get me radio play, because they're going to go get you radio play all over the country in order to get you on the charts, and that's not necessarily what you want in order to build a career. So you've got to work with somebody that understands working in just one region. You've got to be super clear about your expectations, because if they get you radio play all over the country, you're spinning in you know, the Pacific Northwest, you're spinning in, um, the Southwest, you're spinning in the Northeast, you're spinning in the Midwest and the South. You can't possibly back up that radio play by going there without flying. So now all of a sudden it's gotten really expensive for you to work radio. And as the shows start popping— because radio play does help lead to shows if your song is reacting Now you're getting shows in, you know, you might have a show in Seattle, Washington on a Friday night and Miami, Florida on a Saturday night, and you've got to fly between those two markets. You could eat up your entire, um, uh, uh, pay for the shows just traveling between the two cities. So I like to keep it as a 5 or 6 hour driving radius because then the artists can physically make it to the shows, and you can put together a tour that strings together all the cities in a, in a logical fashion. So bringing it back to radio, make sure that you've got a song that can do well at radio. Maybe test it before you go and spend the entire radio budget. If you want to take a song all the way to number 1 at urban radio, you can expect to spend anywhere between $100,000 to $175,000. I know you guys were really shocked when you saw Coach K say that at the Revolt, um, uh, event, but that's the reality of radio. And again, you're paying for relationships as well as those spins. So your radio promotion person— you can't just go to radio and say, here's $1,000, play my song. It does not work that way. Payola is illegal. So you've got to hire a middleman that's got the relationships with the radio stations to get your music played. And I hope that that's really clear. And if it's not, do more research on payola, do more research on radio play, talk to people that have gotten radio play before, and just make sure that it makes logical sense. Because if your song isn't really reacting at radio in the early stages, it does not make sense to pull the trigger and spend a boatload of money to try to get a song to, to do better and climb the charts when it doesn't have a chance of doing that to begin with. Again, this is an area where you can lose a lot of money very, very quickly, so please be careful in doing this. Make sure you build a foundation digitally and in person so that when you take the song to radio, it's already got a buzz. Do not force your song at radio. If you force it, it's just not gonna— as soon as you stop spending the money at radio, it's just gonna drop off and it's not gonna have the effect that you want. The effect that you want is reach and repetition. You want the penetration of your song in as many marketplaces as possible, but it's that repetition. It's when somebody hears your song over and over and over and over that it really starts to catch on. And again, it's okay to do it regionally. You would have to spend millions of dollars marketing and promoting a song if you were going to break it nationally. It's much better to break it regionally. It's kind of like what we did with Little Donald's "Do Better." We had it really blazing in the Southeast to the point where he was doing shows every weekend, and then once you saturate the Southeast, that's when you can start building it, provided you've got the budget. That's when you can start building it into the Mid-Atlantic, into the Mid-South, into the Midwest, into the West Coast, into the Northeast., and, and it spreads pretty much just the way I just described it. It's, it's sort of like a controlled fire. You spark it and then you let it spread naturally, and you just kind of fan the flame so that it spreads at a speed that you can work and that you can afford. Again, it's an area where you can lose a lot of money, is radio. So make sure that your radio guy is super legitimate, make sure you're very clear about what your goals are, and make sure you're going for radio at time when radio was not overcrowded. Because if you're out here trying to compete with Def Jam and Interscope and Atlantic and Warner when they're paying double bonuses or they've got a lot of singles at radio, it's the independents that are going to lose because the radio stations are always going to favor major labels over indies. That doesn't mean you can't take your songs as high as possible. It just means that you've got to time it correctly. You've got to have the right team behind you. You've got have the right song, and you have to already have an established buzz on this record. It's got to be blazing in the clubs, it's got to be blazing on the streets before you take it to radio. Okay guys, I hope this was helpful. Go do more research, and thanks for listening. Bye!