In part 1 of this series we looked at using a service such as Airplay Direct to help get your music played on a radio station. Our station AllAustralianMusic.com hunts for music on Airplay Direct and many other similar sites. While these sites have been an absolute goldmine of great music I’ve found that many of the artists still do not make it easy for me, as a producer, to use their music.
How are they making it hard for me? The main problems are:
* Poor levels. Some are far too quiet and some are so hot that they are distorting. I even get songs from the same artist that vary greatly in volume. Some loud & some soft, all on the same album.
* Leading or trailing silence. This simply means that the songs has 5 or 10 seconds of silence at the start or end of the song that will need to be trimmed.
* Poor/Missing mp3 tags. The mp3 tags help identify the song, artist and album and are critical if you want people to know who they are listening to.

These might seem like trivial items but together they add up to a massive amount of time needed just to make a track playable. If I need to listen to every track, adjust it’s level, trim the start & finish, add in or correct the mp3 tags, then that gets very time consuming when you are dealing with adding forty or fifty tracks to a playlist which I do regularly. To put it simply folks, if I need to spend too much time getting a song ready for airplay, then it will probably get pushed to the end of the pile. The easy ones get through first so do yourself a favour and make it easy for someone to play your stuff.

So, what can you do to improve the chance of getting your song played?
* Watch the levels. Get your level as close to 0DB as possible without going over and into distortion. You can get a simple freeware program like Audacity to check your levels and adjust them accordingly.
* Trim off the silence at the start and end. Again, a simple audio editor like Audacity makes this easy.
* Fill in ALL of the mp3 tags such as track title, album name and artist name. If you don’t have an album title yet, put your band’s name in or TBA or something. Just don’t leave it blank.

Until you actually get your song played, the job is only half done. If you take the time to make it easy for people to play your songs on radio, they just might!

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