Glossary · The business around it
Rotation
Rotation is the schedule that determines how often a station plays a record. Heavy rotation means several plays a day, medium a handful, light occasional. A record can sit in a station's library without being in rotation at all, which means it may never actually be played.
Getting into the library and getting into rotation are two different results, and artists often celebrate the first believing it was the second. The library is where a record becomes available to hosts. Rotation is where the station commits airtime to it. Asking which one has happened is a fair and useful question.
On freeform and specialty-driven stations the idea softens: there may be no rotation clock at all, and the equivalent outcome is a host playing the record regularly. That is worth just as much to an artist, and it is worth knowing which kind of station you are dealing with before you interpret the answer.
653 of the 1363 verified stations are freeform, so for roughly 48% of them the meaningful outcome is a host playing your record repeatedly rather than a formal rotation category.
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 →Radio is the free half, and it stays that way. Every station here is free to reach and no station ever pays to be listed. The Doors is the other half: 100 verified places that are not radio, sync libraries, music supervisors, festivals, contests, live sessions and the music press, 43 of which can actually pay an artist. It also lists the 162 we opened and refused, with the reason each one failed, because most lists of this kind are stale and the rejections are the part nobody else will show you. $9.99, the 2026 Q3 edition →
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