There are innumerable amount of advantages to using radio advertising as a means of promoting music.
It has contributed extensively towards helping young artists get their songs heard all over the nation and has been a gateway for many new acts providing countless opportunities.
Keep an eye out on the Мusic Gateway Blog every Sunday for this series of blogs, which will outline the advantages of radio advertising, promotional strategies, scheduling, contacting radio stations, elaborate on critical guidelines and discuss different methods of reaching specific target audiences.
Before we delve into the hows and general strategies of radio production throughout the series it is important to highlight how effective radio advertising is as a source of promoting music and developing artists careers.
Radio stations as a common platform for advertising
Radio is perhaps one of the most common platforms for advertising and promoting music. Despite it not being as popular as it used to be due to new developments within the music industry such as streaming services, music sharing sites, playlist curations apps etc; the radio is still popular and listened to regularly by people.
In the UK, 90% of the population listens to the radio every week, making it an advantageous and reliable platform for artists to promote their music.
The price of advertising on radio stations
For an artist, a high budget will always be required for many aspects of building a career such as hiring producers, buying equipment and perhaps distributing merchandise for promotion etc.
Therefore, it is crucial that artists find as many cost-efficient solutions as possible to help aid their career development. In many cases, advertising a product can be extremely expensive due to many factors. TV and Print ads can cost hundreds and thousands in costs such as hiring screen actors, directors, studio time and video equipment.
However, radio stations are a much budget-friendlier solution as opposed to other forms of media distribution as they do not require as many resources compared to other advertising platforms, and the process is quite simple.
Time effectiveness
Without a doubt, the process of advertising on common platforms such as TV and Print can be extremely time-consuming. TV adverts have long productions and even longer lead times, taking months to get a decent advert on air.
Likewise, magazines and news publications are also known for having long lead times and in many cases, it can take up to a year of production before an ad goes out, dependent on the publication. However, this is not the case with radio advertising. It can take as little as a few weeks to produce a high-quality radio campaign.
This means radio advertisements are a much simpler and quicker solution to promoting an artist’s song in the most time-effective way.
Measuring the results
It is very easy to determine how successful the ad will be within a short period of time after the song goes on air. The success of the launch can be estimated through direct responses within a couple of weeks and if unsuccessful it will also be obvious fairly quickly. It is unlikely a song wouldn’t attain success on the radio, but on the bright side, the artist wouldn’t have to wait months to find out if radio listeners truly enjoyed their song.
Also if a track was unsuccessful on the radio, it will be an incentive for artists to perhaps work on their tracks. However, this can only be determined if they know how well their songs are doing. It can sometimes be impossible to determine the progress of TV and Print ads, so using Radio advertising is a far better option to avoid waiting a long period of time to find out if your song was a hit on a radio station.