How to submit music to radio stations

Most advice about getting on the radio is written as though radio were one thing. It is not, and the difference is the whole reason artists give up on it.

Rotation has read the sites of 1363 US radio stations by hand, across 44 states. 273 have a door we have confirmed open right now. Another 511 take music by every sign we can read without formally posting the rules, and for 579 we could not find a working submission route at all.

This page is what those 273 stations actually ask for.

The short answer

Send one song, to stations that genuinely programme your genre, the way each one asks, addressed to a show or a music director rather than to nobody. Then follow up once and treat silence as a no.

That is the whole method. Everything below is detail on the part people get wrong, which is almost always the middle clause.

The part of radio that is actually open

When an artist says radio is impossible, they mean commercial radio, and they are right. That road runs through label promotion budgets, chart consultants and relationships built over decades. Nobody is going to talk you onto it.

Non-commercial radio is a different business with different rules. College, community, HBCU and low-power stations are staffed by people who choose music because choosing music is the point of the station. Many of them publish a submission route openly and wait for artists to use it.

The catch is that there are a lot of them, they are not organised, and each one has its own rules. That is the actual barrier. Not gatekeeping, admin.

They do not all want it the same way

This is the single most useful thing on this page. Of the 273 stations accepting right now, here is how they want to receive music:

Sending an email to a station that asked for a form is the same mistake as sending a streaming link to one that asked for a file. It is not a near miss. It is the most common reason a submission is deleted without a reply, and it costs nothing to avoid.

74 of these stations go further and publish a dedicated submission page or form of their own, which makes them the least ambiguous places to start: there is no guessing what they want, because they wrote it down.

Stations taking music right now, one per state

Almost every guide to this subject names no stations at all. Here is one currently accepting station in every state that has one, with how it takes music. Each links to that station's published rules. 30 of the 44 states we cover have a station accepting today.

That is one per state out of 273. The full list, with what each station plays and the rules it posts, is on The Dial.

What to send

1. One song, not the album. Pick the one that suits the station rather than the one you are proudest of. Nobody is listening to track four.
2. A file, not a link, unless they ask for a link. WAV where they ask for lossless, MP3 at 320 otherwise, attached or as a direct download.
3. Name the file so it survives. `Artist - Title.mp3`. A file called `master_v3_FINAL.wav` is a file nobody can find again.
4. Say who it is for. Name the show if the station routes by show. Rotation maps 3929 shows for exactly this reason, and 9 of the accepting stations route music to a programme rather than to a central inbox.
5. A clean edit if the station asks for one. A licensed broadcast station is accountable for what it airs between 6am and 10pm, which is why so many ask for one, and a station that says clean means it.
6. Two sentences about the record, not a biography. Where you are from, what it sounds like, why this station.

What gets a submission deleted

• It arrived by the wrong route. See the table above.
• It was a link when they asked for a file, or a file when they asked for a form.
• It was addressed to nobody, at a station that publishes a named show or director.
• It was explicit at a station that requires clean.
• It was the whole album, or three singles, or a Dropbox folder.
• It was obviously a mass mail. One artist emailed 271 stations in a week in February 2025 and reported no bounces, no unsubscribes and, by his own account, probably nobody answering.

None of these are taste judgements. They are all admin, which means they are all fixable before you send.

Find your market

Radio is local before it is anything else, and a station in a city you might one day play is worth more than a bigger one two thousand miles away. Stations we have verified, by state, with the number accepting right now:

Alabama 2 · Alaska 0 · Arizona 1 · Arkansas 1 · California 54 · Colorado 2 · Connecticut 8 · Delaware 2 · Florida 10 · Georgia 7 · Idaho 0 · Illinois 5 · Indiana 6 · Iowa 0 · Kansas 1 · Kentucky 0 · Louisiana 10 · Maine 1 · Maryland 4 · Massachusetts 12 · Michigan 8 · Minnesota 10 · Mississippi 2 · Missouri 0 · Montana 0 · Nebraska 0 · New Jersey 5 · New Mexico 0 · New York 8 · North Carolina 22 · Ohio 25 · Oklahoma 0 · Oregon 0 · Pennsylvania 9 · South Carolina 2 · Tennessee 5 · Texas 28 · Vermont 0 · Virginia 8 · Washington 14 · Washington, DC 0 · West Virginia 0 · Wisconsin 0 · Wyoming 1

None of the 273 stations asks where an artist lives, so this method works from anywhere. Sending from outside the United States costs you the 41 stations that want physical media, and nothing else.

Questions people ask

How do I submit songs to radio stations?

Find stations that programme your genre, read each one's published submission page, and send one song exactly the way that page asks. Of the 273 US stations accepting right now, the route is an email for some, a web form for others, and a physical disc for a few. There is no single address that reaches radio, and any service claiming otherwise is sending your record somewhere it was not invited.

Is it free to submit music to radio stations?

At the station, yes. Not one of the stations counted here publishes a fee to be considered.

Most of them are also barred from taking one. FCC rule 47 CFR 73.503(d) stops a noncommercial educational station receiving any consideration for broadcasting a programme beyond the programme itself and the costs of airing it, and forbids a promotional announcement for a for-profit business made in exchange for payment. That rule is carried into the low-power FM service by 47 CFR 73.801, so it binds an LPFM station at 101.5 exactly as it binds a college station at 89.1. It is the licence that decides this, not the frequency, which is worth knowing because plenty of noncommercial stations sit well above the reserved part of the band.

Two groups here are outside that rule: 3 of these stations hold commercial licences, and 15 stream online with no FCC licence at all. Neither group publishes a submission fee either, but it is not the FCC stopping them.

Paid services exist that will send on your behalf, and some are legitimate. The door itself is free.

Do I need a distributor, a plugger or a label?

No. Every station counted here publishes a route an unsigned artist can use directly. A plugger buys you their relationships and their time, which is worth something if you have the budget, but nothing about the door requires one.

How many stations should I send to?

Fewer than you think, chosen better than you think. A small New York band went through every college station in the metro area, named the specific show they thought fit each one, and sent a four-sentence message to 32 stations. Seven aired the record. The whole job took about seven hours.

How long until I hear back?

Often never, and that is not a rejection. Most stations do not reply at all, and one tells artists on its own submissions page that it receives 30 to 70 recordings a week. Follow up once after a fortnight, then move on.

Can I submit to commercial radio the same way?

No, and it is worth being plain about it. Commercial playlists are set by programme directors working to consultants and label campaigns, and unsolicited submissions from independent artists are not part of that process. The stations on this page are a different system, which is why they are the ones worth your afternoon.

Where this comes from

Every figure here is computed from Rotation's own registry when this page is built, so it cannot drift from the data. Every station was read off its own published page rather than bought from a list. Statuses change, so confirm before you send.

If you want the same thing for college radio specifically, including why most submissions get ignored, that is in how to submit music to college radio. If you want the message written for you from a station's own posted rules, the submission email builder does that for free.