Doing it yourself vs paying a radio promoter

Should you submit to radio yourself or pay a radio promoter?

The short answer

Submit yourself first. Non-commercial stations publish their submission routes deliberately, so nothing stands between you and them except the work. Pay a promoter when you are buying relationships and time you genuinely do not have, and only when they will name the stations they contact.

	Doing it yourself	Paying a promoter
What it costs	Your time, a few hours per batch	Commonly a few hundred to a few thousand dollars per campaign
What you are buying	Nothing. The doors are public	Relationships, targeting and follow-up, plus somebody else's time
Who owns the relationship afterwards	You	Them, unless you are copied in
Speed	Slower to start, compounds as you learn the stations	Faster out of the gate
Quality control	Yours entirely, for better and worse	Depends completely on the individual
What you learn	Which stations reply, what they want, who you are dealing with	Whatever is in the report you receive
Main failure mode	Sending the wrong thing to the wrong person and never knowing why	Paying for a mass send you could have done yourself

Paying is defensible when

You are releasing on a schedule you cannot personally service, with a firm date.

The promoter names the stations, the shows and the contacts, and you can check them.

They have current relationships in your genre rather than a list.

You have already done it yourself once, so you can tell a real report from a padded one.

What the data shows

All 273 confirmed accepting stations publish a route an artist can use directly, and 74 of the 1363 verified stations have a submission form written for artists. Access is not the thing a promoter sells you. Time and relationships are. Worth knowing before you pay: 579 of the 1363 stations we verified have no working route at all, which is what an unverified list of station contacts is quietly made of.

What to do

Ask for named stations, named shows and named contacts. A station count is not a deliverable.

Agree in writing what counts as a result before any money moves.

Ask what happens to the relationships when the campaign ends.

Send to ten stations yourself first. It is the only way to judge a report you are handed.

Questions people ask

How much does radio promotion cost for an independent artist?

Published rates in independent radio promotion commonly run from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars per campaign, and full-service promotion for a commercial release costs considerably more. The wide range reflects very different services: some campaigns are genuine relationship work and some are a mass email you could send yourself.

Do you have to pay to get on college radio?

No. College and community stations publish submission routes because they want new music, and paying for airplay is a disclosure problem for the station rather than a product it can sell. Anybody guaranteeing airplay for a fee is either not talking about licensed radio or not talking about an add.

Every door is on your sheet.

Pick your sound and region on Rotation and each of these stations shows its real submission contact and the exact rules it posts: clean edit, WAV, form or mail. Checked by hand and kept current. No station here paid to be listed.

Open my sheet →

If you decide to pay somebody, ask which stations first. Services advertising tens of thousands of stations do not publish how many of them are in the United States, or a single station's posted rules, so you find out what you bought after you have paid. Rotation's own campaign is one release sent by hand to doors out of this registry, 273 of which are confirmed accepting right now, every message written to that station's own posted rules, and a report naming every station that received it. 599 dollars a release. Doing it yourself is free here and always will be, which is the only reason that sentence is worth anything. What the campaign actually does →