When you ask anyone under the age of thirty how they find new music you’ll get a lot of answers, but terrestrial radio will probably not be one of them. For years now radio’s role as a New Music Discovery Device has continued to diminish as people shift to other platforms. 

Artists, labels and promoters are well aware of this fact, with many of them waiting to see how many Spotify streams a new song can get before releasing it to radio. 

How do we win at least some of that market share back? 

I think we start by being more open about our process for adding music, creating a place on our websites for submitting music that explains how we add tunes. This could look similar to a literary agent’s submission page where artists submit the work they’re trying to get published. But ours would spell out what info we need, types of music we’re looking for, audio format, etc. Plus, it would create a nice place to gather all of that music instead of simply filling up the PD or MD’s inbox. Maybe only a handful of those songs will make it on-air but more of them could be showcased in a specialty show or online. 

It would also help if we got back on the front end of adding new songs. I understand there’s a solid strategy behind waiting to see if something works, but experienced radio programmers are some of the best in the business at predicting which songs are going to be a hit. We need to utilize those skills and move a little faster on new adds. 

The general perception about terrestrial radio by non-radio people is that all of our formats are the same from market to market and to be fair we’re not doing a lot to change that perception. Yes, it’s true that on mainstream formats 80 to 90% of our playlists are going to be the same regardless of our market. However, what we do with that remaining 10 to 20% can still have a big impact. If we commit to using local music testing to identify some local and regional differences within our markets, and then highlight those songs or categories with imaging and outside marketing, we’ll slowly start to change that narrative. 

Local music testing helps on two fronts, branding to listeners that our stations are still a tool for discovering new music and getting us valuable research we can use to localize our formats. Plus, it’s now much more cost efficient and less complicated to pull off than it used to be. 

Online testing services like Test All Media work well for creating weekly new music tests and for testing recurrent and gold categories over longer stretches of time. Plus, to extend the reach even further we can use it on a tablet on-site at events as well. But, to truly get a response from the masses it’s critical that we tie in incentives for everybody taking the surveys which should be easy to get from a sponsor (Free taco, small drink, or a digital download of something.) If that’s not possible at least a big overriding prize that they all have a chance to win, but everyone getting something small for participating seems to work best. 

Recently I started using short videos to create what I call Social Media Music Meetings for some of my clients. It’s pretty simple, I just take three songs we’re considering adding, grab the hooks, pictures, logo, have the station voice record an intro/outro, and create a poll to let listeners weigh in. They work best if we throw a few dollars behind a boost on Facebook. Besides the marketing and feedback component, it can also help drive clicks to your website if you link it to a page to see full music videos and a web poll to choose the song. Plus, it’s easy to tie in a sponsor. 

Contact me if you’d like me to send you a demo or if you’re interested in having me come on as a consultant and train your staff on creating local music tests and other digital content. 

Pic designed by jcomp for www.freepik.com.