The short answer
Submit to the show whenever the station routes that way or programmes freeform, which is most of this market. At a freeform station there is no station-level taste to match: twenty hosts choose their own records, and your record is right for one of them. Sending to the station addresses nobody in particular.
| Submitting to the station | Submitting to a show | |
|---|---|---|
| Works when | The station has a central music director and a library | The station routes by programme, or programmes freeform |
| Who reads it | One person filtering everything that arrives | The person who actually chooses records for that hour |
| What you need to know | The music director's name and the station's rules | The schedule, the show, the host, and what that show plays |
| Effort per station | Low | Higher, and it is the effort that works |
| Typical outcome | Added to a library, then maybe rotation | A host plays it, and can tell you they did |
| Failure mode | Sitting in a queue nobody clears | Pitching a show that does not play your kind of record |
653 of the 1363 verified stations are freeform, which is 48% of them, which means a station-level genre tag tells you nothing about them. Of the 273 confirmed accepting stations, 9 route music to a specific show, host, DJ or genre director (KNON, WEXT, WHCR, WPLR, WRFN, WRKF, WUNC, WXNA among them). Every one of those stations publishes its schedule openly, so the information is public and almost nobody collects it: Rotation has mapped 3929 shows across 296 stations so far, 2100 with a host the station names itself.
Read the station's published schedule, which nearly every station puts online, and look for a programme whose description or recent playlists match what you make. On a freeform station the schedule is the only useful information, because the station as a whole plays everything.
Not when the station's own rules point you there, and many do. It is a problem when the station has said to address the music director instead, or when you send the same message to every host at one station. Read what the station published and follow it.
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 Services advertising tens of thousands of stations do not publish how many of them are in the United States, or a single station's posted rules, so you find out what you bought after you have paid.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 →
More
Every comparison → · The Playbook → · The data behind these numbers →