For podcast bookers, journalists and partners
Rotation is a hand-verified registry of the college, community and HBCU radio stations across the United States that still take music directly from independent artists. Every station on it was read off its own published page, one at a time. Everything on this page is checked against that registry when the page loads, so the numbers here are the numbers today.
Each of these is built on something counted, not an opinion. Pick whichever fits your show.
What actually happens when one person checks every door instead of buying a list. 579 of the 1363 stations had no working submission route at all: the page was gone, no usable route was published, or the station states it is closed to outside submissions. That is roughly what an artist gets when they pay a few hundred dollars for a contact database.
Good for: music business, data, DIY artist shows
There is a market for buying your song into a stream. One company doing it is listed on NASDAQ, and its own quarterly filing reports $7,584 of revenue against a $2.98M loss. The alternative is unglamorous and free: a real music director at a real station decides. Rotation never charges a station, and no station here paid to be listed.
Good for: contrarian takes, artist advocacy, business breakdowns
The whole operation runs on scheduled agents: one finds pages publishing stale radio information and emails them a verified correction, one drafts the weekly newsletter and schedules it, one builds an artist spotlight every week, others find artists who just released and draft the outreach. A person presses send where a person should. What that actually feels like to run, and where it goes wrong.
Good for: AI, automation, solo founder and bootstrapper shows
No paid placement, no label required, no playlist gatekeeper. 273 stations are taking submissions right now and 142 of those are freeform, which means genre tells you almost nothing about who will play you. The registry also covers 33 HBCU stations, 8 of them accepting right now. What it takes to get in, and why most artists get binned in thirty seconds.
Good for: music discovery, radio, culture, HBCU and Atlanta shows
42 of the accepting stations require a clean edit and will not edit it for you. 8 take physical media and nothing else. Practical, specific, immediately useful to any audience that makes music.
Good for: how-to segments, artist audiences, short-form
One line
DeShawn Marks is the founder of Rotation, a hand-verified registry of the US radio stations that still take music from independent artists.
Short, for a show description
DeShawn Marks is the founder of Rotation, an independent radio submission platform based in Atlanta. He read 1363 college, community and HBCU radio station pages by hand to find out which ones still take music directly from independent artists, published what he found, and built the registry that came out of it. Rotation never charges a station, and no station here paid to be listed.
Longer, for a press page
DeShawn Marks is the founder of Rotation, an independent radio submission platform in Atlanta. Frustrated that every list of radio contacts an artist could find was stale, sold, or both, he read 1363 college, community and HBCU station pages one at a time and recorded what each one actually asks for: the exact door, the format, whether a clean edit is required, whether it wants a file or an envelope. 579 of them turned out to have no working route at all. 273 are open right now.
He published the findings as original data, built free tools around them, and runs the whole operation solo with scheduled agents doing the research and drafting while he does the parts that need a person. Rotation's position is a narrow one and he holds it: artists pay nothing to see where the doors are, stations are never charged, and no spin is ever for sale.
The State of Independent Radio Submissions. Every figure computed from the registry, method and limits stated, counts downloadable as CSV.
The Dial, by state and by sound, with each station's own posted rules.
Put the readiness checker on your site. One line of code, nothing to buy.
deshawn@getinrotation.com. Based in Atlanta, US Eastern time. Remote or in person.
Book him → Read the data first →
Checked by hand, not scraped