photo: Mary Whitney
Radio, in all its modern forms, remains a huge platform for playing music throughout the world. Here’s a quick guide to figuring out if your music is playing somewhere out there in radio-land, anywhere in the world — and what to do about it.
If a tree falls in the forest, it doesn’t matter if anyone hears it. But if your music is played on a radio station anywhere in the world, it definitely matters if you don’t hear about it.
In some cases, serious fanbases and royalty pots go completely unnoticed, simply because the information isn’t shared.
Last month, we profiled a group whose music was being played heavily on Polish radio. Just one problem: they didn’t know about it. The duo, Few Wolves, had two hits on major Warsaw stations. But Spotify’s data didn’t offer their manager, Jesper Skibsby, any clue that this was happening.
“By looking at our Spotify data we would NEVER have understood that Poland and especially Warsaw was an emerging market for us, actually by far our biggest and most emerging market,” Skibsby said.
Amazingly, there’s a happy ending here. Or at least it’s getting there. After months of laborious work, the plays are in the process of being paid out, even though they date back to 2016. But the entire ordeal caused Skibsby to start WARM, a company devoted to detecting radio plays worldwide — and preventing these exact situations from happening again.
But this goes beyond individual artists. Indie labels, publishers, management agencies, and even promoters can use this data to better capture this information.
And hopefully recognize lots of unpaid revenues.
We’ve since partnered with WARM to help musicians and music IP owners realize that
(a) radio play is far bigger than you might imagine;
(b) radio can generate a lot of income if it hits in any number of markets; and
(c) you should probably be monitoring the world for radio plays.
Beyond WARM, there are a number of different monitoring companies that cover stations worldwide. Simply stated, who you choose depends on what you need.
And with that, here’s a quick rundown of several major services monitoring airplay around the world.
(Note: click here for the enlarged view (recommended). And for an even deeper breakdown, including historical capabilities, company HQ information, data delivery details and more, check this PDF out. Enjoy!)
