What The Rabbit Is Up To- Radio Promotion as an Indie Artist

So right now I’m working on trying to get one of my songs “Come and Sing Noel” played on radio this Christmas. (You can hear it on my myspace page.) What does releasing a song to radio entail for an indie artist? Well here’s the process broken down in steps:

1) Make a stellar, pro-sounding radio edit of the track you want to promote (send to radio). Must keep to around 3 minutes 30 seconds! We’ve only got 4 minutes to save the world people.
2) Get the track to radio stations either digitally or by snail mail ($$$). I chose the digital route this time which is still $$$ but faster and environmentally sound. (Yay, it’s also the last $$$ I’m going to spend that is not album making related, but here’s hoping it’s “the little song that could” so I can make some $ back in single sales.)
3) Next comes the ‘radio promotion’ part- the phone calls and emails checking to see that the stations got the single and if they didn’t, get it to them if they are willing to listen. If they did get the single, asking if they listened, and oh so politely and earnestly ask them to add it to their playlists. Normally this is where the independent (not working for a label) radio promoter comes in. You pay radio promoters on retainer for 3-5 months to call stations for you and push and promote the single (ask ask ask the stations to play your single and put it in rotation). Unfortunately I don’t have a few thousand handy to hire a promoter so I’m self-promoting. Also, this being a Christmas song, it’s only viable for 4-6 weeks from Thanksgiving to New Year’s.
4) More calls and emails to check up if the single has been added into rotation. Not sure how much I will push it as apparently it’s already late to try to get a space on the rotation for Christmas. That doesn’t mean I won’t try as much as I can. The tough thing about radio is that program directors may like your song, but there might not be enough room on the playlist (which has spots that may have been committed to Label artists already) or there are just too many songs waiting in line to get a shot at airplay. I’m not even going to try to imagine the reality of the politics involved!
5) Hope and pray that when a station plays the track, people will call in and ask “Who sings that song?” “I love that song, can we hear it again?” and that the song explodes. Hey, DREAM BIG!