Nothing leaves your device

What to write when you send a station your music.

Fill in your details once. Pick the stations you are sending to. Get one message per station, built from that station's own posted rules: an email, a set of form answers, or a postal cover note, depending on how the station actually takes music. It warns you when one of the station's rules blocks the send, and it names the show when the station routes by show.

Your details stay in this browser. There is no account and nothing is uploaded.

What a submission email has to do

The short answer

A radio submission email answers two questions before anything else: does this record fit us, and is it ready to air. Say who you are, where you are from, what the record is, what it sounds like in one line, the format, whether there is a clean edit, and how to reach you. Under 150 words.

Everything else is decoration. A music director working through a queue is not reading for pleasure, they are filtering, and the submissions that survive are the ones that made filtering easy. The template below is the shape that does that. The builder further down fills it in for a specific station and adjusts it to what that station published.

The template

Copy this if you would rather write it yourself. Replace everything in brackets.

Subject: [Genre] submission: [Artist name], "[Track title]" (clean edit)

Hi [music director's name, or the show host's name],

I am [Artist name], a [genre] artist based in [city, state]. I would like to
submit "[Track title]" for consideration on [CALL SIGN].

[If you are local: I am based in [city], so I am local to you.]
[If the station routes by show: I think it fits [show name], which is why I am
writing to that show rather than to the station generally.]

The sound: [one line. Two comparable artists and what the record actually does.]

Details
  Track: [Track title]
  Release date: [date]
  Format: [WAV, or MP3 320]
  Clean edit: [yes, attached / not needed, there is nothing to edit]
  ISRC: [code]

[The audio is attached. / The WAV is here: [direct download link]]
[One page on the release is attached.]

Thanks for the time. Happy to send anything else you need.

[Artist name]
[email] · [phone]
[link]

Why each line is there

What gets a submission deleted

An email is not always the answer

This page is called the submission email builder, and for most stations that is exactly right. But of the 273 stations accepting submissions right now, only 153 actually want an email. The rest want something else, and sending a letter to a station that asked for a form is the same mistake as sending a link to one that asked for a file.

How they want itStationsWhat you actually send
Email153A short letter to a published address, with the file attached or linked as they specify.
Their own web form67Field answers, not prose. Nobody reads a cover letter pasted into a notes box.
A page with instructions11Read it first. The route is usually an address or a form one click further in.
Post41A disc and a cover note, with your name and contact written on the disc itself.

The builder above already knows which of these applies to each station you pick, and writes the right thing for each one. This section exists because the choice matters even if you never use the tool.

What a form wants that an email does not

A web form is not a letter with boxes. It is usually a music director's intake sheet, and the fields are the questions they would have asked anyway: artist name, genre, release date, a link, sometimes a one-line description. Three rules make the difference between a form that gets read and one that gets skipped.

What to write on a disc

41 stations still take physical media, and a handful accept nothing else. It is the least crowded route in independent radio precisely because it takes effort, so the effort is the point.

Why so many go to a show rather than a station

9 of the accepting stations route music to a specific show, host or genre director rather than a central music director. At those stations a letter to the general inbox is a letter to nobody in particular, and the same record sent to the right programme is read by the person who would actually play it.

This is also why the sheet lists shows and not only stations. A station is a building. A show is a person with a slot and a taste, and that is the unit that decides.

Build yours

Step 1 saves in this browser so you only do it once. Step 2 is where the work actually gets saved: pick every station you are sending to and get all the messages at once.

Step 1 · Your details

Two comparable artists and what the record actually does. This is the line that gets read.

A download, not a streaming page. Used only where a station accepts links.

Step 2 · Pick the stations

0 selected

Questions people ask

What should you say in a radio submission email?

Who you are, where you are based, what the record is, what it sounds like in one line, the format you are sending, whether there is a clean edit, and how to reach you. Keep it under about 150 words. A music director is deciding whether the record fits and whether it is ready to air, so answer those two questions before anything else.

How long should a radio submission email be?

Short enough to read in under a minute, which in practice means about 120 to 150 words plus a few lines of details. Long emails are not read more carefully, they are read less often. Everything a music director needs should be visible without scrolling.

Should you attach the audio file or send a streaming link?

Send the file when the station allows an attachment, because a link is one more step for somebody working through a queue and some stations refuse links outright. Where the file is too large, use a direct download rather than a streaming page, and say in the email which format is behind the link.

Should you send the same email to every radio station?

No, and it is the most common reason good submissions are ignored. Stations differ on the route they accept, the format they want, whether they need a clean edit, and whether music goes to the station or to an individual show. A message that ignores a station's posted rules signals that its page was never read. That is the whole reason this page builds one message per station instead of one template.

Should you follow up on a radio submission?

Once, after about two weeks, and then leave it. Check the station's public playlist first, because many college and community stations publish what they played, and asking whether you were aired when the answer is published tells the music director you did not look.

Related

Is your song radio ready? · Email, form or post: how stations want it sent · The station or the show · The glossary · The Playbook · Beyond radio: the verified non-radio doors → · The data behind these numbers

Checked by hand, not scraped · Rules read off each station's own page