Glossary · The rules
Freeform radio
Freeform radio is a format in which each host chooses their own music rather than following a station playlist. There is no central format and no rotation clock, so what gets played depends entirely on which programme and which host you reach.
Freeform is why genre matching fails so often in this part of the dial. A station tagged as playing everything will appear in every genre search, which makes a filtered list look far more promising than it is. The station has no taste to match, but its individual programmes do, and those are the things you actually submit to.
It also means a freeform station is rarely a wasted approach. There is usually some show that fits, even for a record that no format would take, as long as you do the work of finding it in the schedule rather than sending to the station generally.
653 of the 1363 verified stations are freeform, which is 48% of them. For those stations a genre tag carries no information at all, and the show list is the whole of the useful data.
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 Services advertising tens of thousands of stations do not publish how many of them are in the United States, or a single station's posted rules, so you find out what you bought after you have paid.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 term in the glossary → · The Playbook → · The data behind the numbers →