Glossary · The business around it
Radio plugger
A radio plugger, also called a radio promoter, is a person or company paid to take your record to stations on your behalf. They handle the targeting, the sending and the follow-up, and in independent music published rates commonly run from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars for a campaign.
What you are buying is relationships and time, not access. Nothing stops an artist contacting these stations directly, because non-commercial stations publish their submission routes on purpose. A good plugger knows which music director is receptive to what, knows when to follow up, and has the standing for a call to be taken.
The question worth asking before paying is what specifically will be delivered: which stations by call sign, what counts as a result, and what you will receive as evidence. A campaign that reports impressions or reach rather than named stations and plays is not reporting airplay.
All 273 confirmed accepting stations publish a route an artist can use directly. Whether a plugger is worth paying is a question about your time and their relationships, not about whether the door is open to you.
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 Services advertising tens of thousands of stations do not publish how many of them are in the United States, or a single station's posted rules, so you find out what you bought after you have paid.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 →
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