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Maximize Your Content with a Radio Show

Electronic Dance Money Episode 064 - Maximize Your Content with a Radio Show

Back in 2015 I first launched my own radio show which was up for about 2 years.

It took a while, but I was lucky enough to get the show on multiple radio stations, including being played between two of the biggest radio shows at the time.

Having that radio show taught me 2 valuable lessons that are still useful to this day:

1. Consistent content is one of the most important things for current and new fans

2. It taught me the value of sharing other’s music and how you can build connections

If you’re interested in how a radio show can affect your current brand, check out this new episode of Electronic Dance Money

What You’ll Learn:

  • What a radio show is
  • How to create a radio show
  • Why a radio show is valuable
  • How to upload your radio show

and much more!

Automatic Episode Transcript — Please excuse any errors, not reviewed for accuracy

Hey guys, welcome to electronic dance money, your number one business resource for making money as electronic musicians and producers.

What’s up guys, welcome back to a brand new episode of electronic dance money. I hope you guys are doing well. I’m doing fine on this Wednesday, afternoon Wednesday, it’s Tuesday. It’s Tuesday. Right now I’m stuck in the middle of the week. I just got back from camping over the weekend, which was a lot of fun. So I’m trying to get back into the swing of things as I’m recovering from hiking miles, but anyways, enough about me, let’s talk about today’s episode, which we’re going to be discussing whether or not you should create a radio show, and what benefits are added with that. And then obviously, how to get started. So back when I was producing a lot more. And that’s kind of where my main focus was on being an artist. I originally started a radio show and this was at the recommendation of my previous mentors who also had a radio show. And this was back in 2015 that I think I started the show it was called the grid and it was a ton of fun. I originally started off releasing episodes every month, and then I went to bi weekly and eventually weekly. I can’t remember how long I was doing it weekly for I want to say I did a weekly for a little bit and then pulled back as weekly was super intense, and costs actually quite a bit of money. But it was super beneficial for creating consistent content. Now the issue that I ran into was that that was the only content I was creating. And I wasn’t releasing a lot of music. So I didn’t reach as big of an audience as I could have. So that growth wasn’t necessarily there. But today is a bit different. This was back in 2015 you didn’t have Tick Tock i think i think Tick Tock might have come out in 2016. But at the time, maybe musically was just starting and if you don’t know what musically was because you got into tik tok during COVID. Like most people I was originally on musically back in 2017. I think he was 2017 maybe 2018. Yeah, it might have been 2018. I can’t remember either 2017 or 2018, musically was big at the time and tick tock was a competitor and then Tick Tock bought out musically. And now Tick Tock is where it’s at today. And Instagram was like kind of the big thing at the time in 2015, Facebook was starting to die off people were still on Twitter. And that’s pretty much all you really had that was like Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, and obviously people on YouTube and whatnot. But, and I think you too, didn’t have as strong of copyright rules. Regardless, I wasn’t even on Instagram, I don’t think at the time, or at least I wasn’t posting on Instagram. So I wasn’t promoting the show on Instagram. And at this time, this is the transition stage, that page’s ad where it was now pay to play so I didn’t really promote it at all. With today’s world and the way you you can create content radio shows, I think are extremely beneficial. But the radio show did give me a lot of I did get in front of different audiences I got on multiple radio stations like three or something. One of the radio stations I my show played before hardwell. So that was pretty big, and I was actually sandwiched between hardwell and someone else I think dannic he was danek show and then it was mine and then hard wells. So radio stations are huge opportunity for you to get in front of the right audience and a new audience and start building your fans that way. But one of the other even more important factors, especially if you’re wanting new music is the benefits that you get from connecting with bigger artists. And we’re going to talk about how you can do that through a radio show and a little bit but also getting added to promo lists of record labels. So you’re consistently getting new tracks before they’re even released from Big and small artists. And you have a chance to feature that new music before anyone else so your show can be kinda become kind of a cutting edge, new music that no one’s heard before on those shows. It’s really beneficial huge entertainment value a lot of consistent content and it’s a lot to offer for your new and current fans take some pressure off of you of having to create new content ideas because a new radio shows really exciting new music people probably haven’t heard before and it’s an hour long. That’s huge. It’s massively beneficial. So radio shows people radio shows are dying, I don’t think so I still think there’s a place for them. People are listening to podcast more than ever now. And radio shows are usually hosted on podcast platforms. So if someone’s working, it’s a good thing to put on to now and listen to while they enjoy it, a state of trance is still one of the biggest radio shows ever.

I mean, Arman has been doing that show weekly. for 20 years now, playing two hours every Thursday, it’s wildly, wildly big. I don’t think they’re going anywhere. And I think people are still listening to radio shows. And again, the just the content aspect of you, if you’re looking for new ways of coming up with content, and you want new content to create a radio show is wildly beneficial. But when I had my radio show, I was starting to actually build relationships. Now, if I had known what I know, now, I would have nurtured those relationships the way I’ve talked about in the past. Again, like I’ve talked about previously, in other episodes, a lot of this podcast is talking to my past self, and all my failures and fuck ups. And one of the biggest fuck ups is the fact that I was actually starting to talk with bigger artists. But I didn’t want to fan fan girl out and I didn’t want to scare them and push them away by like, messaging them too much or being weird. And so I tried to play it cool, I was dming some people and I would get exclusive tracks, I still have tracks this day from some huge artists that have not been released. And these were sent to me in like 2015 unfortunately, I didn’t nurture those relationships, I didn’t continue talking with them and so if I were to message them now they would have probably no idea who I was. So that’s kind of done and gone with which sucks but now you have an opportunity to learn from my mistakes and learn how you can get into connection with those bigger artists. And if you’ve listened to previous episodes in the past, you know how to nurture those relationships and hopefully they turn into something massively beneficial for you today or in the future let’s talk about actually creating a radio show now so step one is going to be obviously coming up with what kind of genres you want to play now if you don’t know what a radio show is, I should probably tell you what it is I probably should have started that right but you know me I jump off jump all over the place I’m chaotic like that might stupid add brain a radio show is essentially an hour to hour long show that you’re playing music right you have a d u DJ set and you can either live record it or you can produce it within your DAW which is what I used to do much easier to produce it within your DAW and then you post that on a podcast platform it goes out and boom you have a radio show it’s that’s it it’s an hour long show two hours however long you want keep it in hours usually best two hours a little is a little intense, unless you’re like Armand and you bringing guests to guest spot for the last 30 minutes or an hour or whatever. So the first thing you want to do is figure out what genres Do you want to play in those genres should probably be relative to your actual music you’re producing and releasing right? If we’re producing trance we probably don’t want to play dubstep in our in our radio show right? Doesn’t make sense for our brand doesn’t work with our brand trance. Fans aren’t gonna like the dubstep. The dubstep fans probably aren’t going to like the trance some do. If you’re a fan of seven lines, you’ll probably like a little bit of trance but most trans producers don’t necessarily care for dubstep. Once we figure out the genres we want to play now we need to start thinking about what kind of intro we need to create you need to create an intro of some sort you can either hire someone to create your intro or you could create a yourself if you have enough music released then make a quick like 32nd mashup of all your tracks cutting in and out of each other and then either you can voice it over talking about this is the so and so’s show where we play the best in Progressive House Music you’re gonna hear so and so for the next hour, whatever, you can hire someone on Fiverr to do that pretty cheap if you want to hire like a specific voice actor. You

just want to do it yourself. Go listen to a radio show intros go listen to testo Club life. Wolf radio by daijiro hardwell on air Tonia by tritonal there’s I mean Armin Van Buren with state of trance, go listen to some of those intros and I think you’ll get a good picture of what you need to do and how you need to create it. If I still had my radio show. I would Post it for you guys. But I actually still have all the drop all the episodes, I have all I did it for like, man, I don’t like two years, a little over two years had 52 episodes, I think and then I stopped doing it because I can’t remember why I think I was I got dropped from one or two radio stations because the stations in general the companies weren’t doing too well. I just got sick and tired again, I wasn’t doing the right I wasn’t making the right move. So nothing I was doing was actually benefiting me. wasn’t wasn’t right wasn’t appropriate. I kind of set myself up for failure, which sucked, but you now need to get an intro created. And as you start getting that created, then you want to start doing some research on some podcast host host. Now this is one of the reasons why I don’t have my podcast or my not my podcast, but my radio show listed anymore was I had a custom RSS feed that was set up by a buddy of mine, Brad could upload it onto one of my websites, my old website, essentially just uploaded all in there. And it would automatically do it didn’t need to pay for hosting or anything like that. Unfortunately, the website is now gone. And so I no longer have those listed anywhere. Like I say I still have the dropbox files, but you need to find probably a podcast host unless you can set up that customized RSS feed like that using WordPress where you can just upload it there. Blake for my podcast host I use buzzsprout it’s one of the more famous ones I’ll link that in the show notes. I’ll give you guys a referral an affiliate link, if you want to go set up your own radio show sign up, give a little kickback to the show. There’s also pod bean. I’ve never used that one. But that’s another really big popular one. And then anchor.fm, but I have not even looked too much into anchor.fm. I don’t know of anyone that uses anchor. I just know people who use buzzsprout. And some people who use pod bean people like pod bean. The nice thing about buzzsprout is you can do you probably wouldn’t do this with radio show but you could promote your releases new releases coming up, you can set pre roll ads, you guys have probably heard some pre roll ads on this show. It’s that little ad that will play the first like 30 seconds of the show before the actual intro starts. So you can you can import pre roll and post roll ads so ads before and ads after. And you can specify which episodes you want to place that on you can place on every single episode and then you can remove it from every single episode. Really nice, really convenient. So it might be a benefit benefit for you to promote a new track that’s coming out for you guys. That’s one of the other massive benefits right of radio show you can you have a chance to showcase your new music and promote your new music that’s coming out. Now once you’ve found a podcast host with the way copyright is being treated Now you may have it’s possible that you might have some issues getting on to Apple podcasts originally, it’s possible you may have some issues getting on to other podcasting applications to begin with. And the reason why I say that is because sometimes Apple I know they have in the past I know they originally did this with my first radio shows they will block it if it’s essentially a radio show has copyright music, they’ll block it from being posted originally to begin with, because they review new podcasts, not new episodes, but new shows that are coming out, they review them to see if they’re appropriate, and then they’ll essentially approve it. And now you can upload and they won’t check it again, unless I think it gets reported enough times. So what you may need to do is essentially create, I would I would first create a few episodes of your radio show. But the first episode, create something of you talking for just five or 10 minutes some bullshit, upload that to begin with, publish it, and then replace it with the actual first step. So the radio show just so that it gets approved, it gets accepted and you can trick the algorithms or the person that is approving it into thinking that it’s an actual talking podcast, it’s not about to turn into a DJ radio show again. And that’s sometimes that’s because of copyright issues. those platforms are just trying to cover their ass so you may need to trick them to begin with. Keep

that in mind if you have issues, posting your show, but once you get your podcast host set up, you can do that to begin with if you want you can do it right before you start actually posting your episodes but you then need to figure out a posting schedule though you need to. And the reason why you want to figure it out is because you want to stay consistent with that schedule. That consistency is how you build an audience over time. It’s how people expect what to expect and when to expect it right. So are you going to do it monthly? Are you going to do it bi weekly. Are you going to do it weekly. You know Monthly can be tricky because sometimes it’s not enough, weekly can usually be too much to begin with, I think bi weekly is a good starting point. Keep in mind, unless you’re already a part of a lot of promo lists, or you know a lot of people that you can get quality tracks from, you’re probably going to have to be perusing beatport and purchasing tracks. And it can get pricey, depending on how you set up the radio show. If you’re going to do long transitions and mixes, or if you’re going to do very quick transitions and mixes, then that’s going to determine how many tracks you buy. On average, I would buy about 1617 tracks, I was a part of some promo list though. So really, I was at towards the end there, I was really only buying like nine or 10 tracks, almost half of my tracks I was getting from promo lists, and the other half I was actually purchasing. So to begin with, though, you’re probably going to have to purchase most of your music. And this can be tricky depending on how much money you have. So keep in mind that you need a budget for this sort of thing. One, you’re gonna have to pay your podcasting host and a podcast host like buzzsprout, you can pay up to a certain amount of hours. So right now, I do my show bi weekly, and I think I pay like four hours a month, right? I’m not doing a podcast every single week, not every single episodes an hour long, so I don’t need to pay for anything more than four hours. This is something to keep in mind. If I wanted more than four hours, if you were doing more than actually I think it’s I think it’s less than that. I think I can post up to three hours really not four, that’s important to keep in mind if you’re going the buzzsprout route, and you want to do weekly, well, if you can only do three hours a month, you have to pay for the higher tier, which is like 30 bucks or something and then on top of it, you’re gonna have to purchase tracks, weekly. And if you have to purchase 15 tracks every single week, let’s say 15, maybe 16 track every single week at an average of like $1.50, maybe $2. Well, now you’re going to pay between 30 and $40 every single week for new tracks. You can kind of see how expensive this can get to you’re paying almost over almost $200 a month for your radio show. Now this is why I suggest not doing it weekly to begin with. Because over time you need to build your list of promos you’re getting that’s going to be the key factor of saving you a lot of money and a lot of time for searching for music. And we’ll talk about the promo live stuff in a little bit. But if you’re only paying $30 every two weeks much more manageable. That’s every every paycheck you’re paying $30 It’s way easier to manage that rather than every paycheck you’re paying $60 or more sometimes $80 every paycheck if you if you have a weekly radio show, keep at least bi weekly. If you want to do monthly you can but I still don’t suggest monthly the guy your schedule, you need to start purchasing tracks. Now you need to create the show. Like I said previously, you can either record it DJing or you can create it within your DAW. I think creating it within your dog is a lot easier, it’s less time consuming and you can’t fuck up right, can’t really fuck it up. And the way you set that up as you essentially have two different channels that you’re flipping one track track a to track B over and over and then just DJ like you normally would with a controller but within your dos so if you’re cutting the low end out of one track and turning the low end up of another just do that with an EQ cut the low out your turn, bypass it on bypass it on the other one, flip it back and forth, set up your transitions. You can do some more fun editing stuff in there. But usually with a radio show people are there to listen to new music and they want to listen to the entire track usually take that with a grain of salt though again this is a creative field you can do whatever you want now when you create the show before you actually start posting it one thing that I will suggest you do is scheduled tweets so if you don’t use Twitter start using Twitter and scheduled tweets for exact times of tracks they’re being placed played. So you want to have like the the show that it’s on have the artists the track the minute marker and tag the artists tag the record labels and have the timestamps this right here. What I’m telling you what the twit with Twitter and scheduling your tweets is how you’re going to start being recognized by bigger artists that you play, especially if you start playing them consistently. They’ll start liking your stuff, they’ll start retweeting it, quote tweeting it, and eventually hopefully start following you. And when they start doing that, now, the door is open for you to start a conversation with them. And you can start saying, Hey, I play your stuff all the time. I appreciate you following me and retweeting or whatever liking my stuff, I would love it. If I could, if you have a promos, I’d love to play them on the show, feel free, send them over. And now you can actually start building a conversation and adding value, right, because if you have an audience, and you have a show, and they have tracks, and they want to get in front of that audience, well, now you can start promoting their tracks for them for free, massively beneficial, you get a cool relationship that you can nurture over time you get exclusive music that other people aren’t hearing that you get to promote yourself. That’s massively beneficial for you. And that’s how you can start creating and building relationships with bigger artists that you didn’t think you would be able to reach before. All through using a radio show that you otherwise might not be able to get might not be able to build that relationship any other way, other than with a radio show and promoting their music

for them. But the scheduling of tweets and and tweeting those messages out for when tracks are playing and who they’re who produced the track and the record labels, wildly beneficial for their eyes, getting on you and starting to recognize who you are building that online social media presence so that they remember you. Alright, once you’ve scheduled those. Now it’s time to post and promote the show. And that is how you’re going to get started with your radio show. So once you start posting and promoting now is when you want to start reaching out to record labels. Reach out to record labels you haven’t reached out to in the past or you haven’t they haven’t responded and let them know hey, I played this track on my radio show last week or the other day. And I love to play more tracks that you’re releasing, can you add me to your promo list. Once you’re added you’ll start just receiving emails, promo emails of tracks, different artists big or small, that you get to download for free and use months before they’re released. And this is how you can start freeing up your wallet, saving some money, getting exclusive tracks and turning your radio show into that exclusive radio show that people like to listen to new music that they’ve never heard before. That they’re not going to hear anywhere else. wildly beneficial can add a lot of value to your show, and gets people to actually tune in. Now, I want to give you something for free here. If you’d like to see how to set up those tweets, the best way possible, what that outline looks like. If you’d like to see what that outline of reaching out to a record label looks like head to Envious audio.com slash radio show. It’s all one word radio show. And you’ll be able to download a quick little one page guide on how to set up those tweets. What to use to schedule your tweets, along with what the email layout should look like when you start reaching out to labels to guarantee a response. So if you want to learn how to format your tweets, how to schedule them and how to reach out to record labels to get add to promo lists. Head to Envious audio.com slash radio show to download that guide down. That’s it for today guys. Thanks for hanging out checking out the show. If you want to look at any of the show notes for some of the things we talked about today like the podcast hosts for for your radio show and Envious audio.com slash Episode 64 where you can check that stuff out and I’ll see you guys next time. Take care

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