Is your song radio ready?

What "radio ready" actually means

It is not a judgement about the song. A record can be finished, mastered and genuinely good and still be unusable by a station, because "ready" here means the package clears the rules that station published. Those rules are mostly boring, entirely public, and the reason most submissions are deleted without a reply.

Rotation has read the posted rules of 273 stations that are accepting submissions right now. The checker above runs your answers against them and tells you how many you currently qualify for, and what each fix would unlock. It never invents a rule to make the number move, and anything a station has not stated is counted in your favour, so the figure it gives you is the conservative one.

The rules that stop a record dead

There is an important difference between a station that mentions a requirement and one that will accept nothing else, and almost every guide online blurs it. Both numbers are worth knowing, so here are both.

The right-hand column is the one the checker blocks on, because those are the stations where a wrong format is fatal rather than inconvenient. The left-hand column is larger and softer: a station that says it prefers lossless will usually still listen to a 320 kbps MP3. Guides that quote only the big number make radio look harder than it is; guides that quote only the small one make it look easier.

What the audio check reads, and why your file never leaves your computer

Drop a WAV or MP3 on the checker and it is decoded in your own browser. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored, and nothing reaches Rotation or anybody else. That is not a privacy promise you have to take on faith: put the page in aeroplane mode after it loads and the analysis still runs.

It reads the things a music director's playout system will read.

• Format, sample rate and bit depth. Whether the file is genuinely lossless or an MP3 wearing a .wav extension, which is more common than you would think.
• Peak level and clipping. The percentage of samples pinned at full scale. A record that clips hard is the one thing an engineer will notice before the music.
• Duration. Programmers slot by length, and a seven-minute track is a different conversation from a three-minute one.
• Leading and trailing silence. Dead air at the top of a file is the most common technical reason a track sounds broken on air.
• Channels. Whether it is genuinely stereo, or mono duplicated across two channels.

None of this tells you whether the song is good. It tells you whether the file will survive contact with a station.

The nine questions, and why each one is asked

The checker asks nine things about the package around the record. Every one of them came from a rule a real station published.

1. Do you have a clean radio edit? The single biggest unlock in the whole list. Stations licensed by the FCC are accountable for what they broadcast outside the overnight safe harbour, so an explicit-only record is competing for the hours when almost nobody is listening.
2. Can you send a file rather than a streaming link? A music director cannot load a Spotify URL into a playout system. Sending a link is asking a volunteer to do a job you could have done.
3. Do you have a WAV or FLAC? Some stations require lossless for airplay. MP3 at 320 kbps is the practical floor everywhere else.
4. Could you mail a CD if a station asked? Some of the best college and community stations still take physical media, and a few take nothing else.
5. Is your file named Artist - Song Title? Directors sort hundreds of files at a time. A file called final_master_v3.wav is lost the moment it lands.
6. Do you have a one-page bio or EPK? Who you are, the release, your city, your genre, one link, one contact. Read in about twenty seconds or not at all.
7. Do you have square cover art at high resolution? Needed for now-playing displays and station playlist systems.
8. Do you know your ISRC, and is the song registered with a PRO? The ISRC is how a spin becomes a reported spin, and the PRO registration is how a reported spin becomes a payment.
9. Is any part of the track AI-generated? Several stations ban it in writing and one asks for a signed certification, so the honest answer matters more than the convenient one.

The most common wasted submission

It is not a technical failure. It is sending a record to a station that does not programme that kind of music. Roughly four in ten stations on the registry are freeform, meaning each host picks their own music and the station itself locks no genre, so a genre label tells you nothing about them either way. The rest state what they play, and sending across that line is the most reliable way to be ignored.

That is why the checker asks for your genre and your region before it counts anything: the number it gives you is the number of stations that would actually consider your record, not the size of the list.

Questions people ask