radio promotion
Beginning in September 2022, Ron Poore and his Atlantic Records radio promotions team emailed and called alternative-rock program directors for months to convince them to add Paramore‘s new single, “This Is Why,” to playlists. Their efforts paid off: The song hit No. 1 on the Alternative Airplay chart in February 2023. “You work that record for weeks and weeks and weeks, and all of a sudden it starts showing up in the research,” says Poore, then Atlantic’s senior vp of promotion, alternative and rock and a 21-year veteran of breaking radio hits by Death Cab for Cutie, Coldplay, Portugal. The Man and others.
“This Is Why” is an example of a classic record label promo story: an experienced major-label staff working radio connections to achieve chart success. But it didn’t end well for Poore. In February, Atlantic laid off Poore as part of an industry-wide downsizing that hit promo teams especially hard.
Trending on Billboard
“Five years ago, 10 years ago, it’s radio, radio, radio,” Poore says. “And now it’s the last thing we do at these labels.”
Layoffs at two of the top labels, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group, began in February, affecting dozens of employees, many in traditional media positions such as publicity, marketing and radio. (Sources say similar cuts affected Sony Music Entertainment as well.) The layoffs have had little to do with the companies’ financial health: Universal earned $12 billion in revenue and $1.3 billion in net profit last year, and Warner said it is coming off its best quarter ever. But top executives from both labels announced they were adapting to a long-running industry shift towards new technology.
In a late February statement announcing layoffs of roughly two dozen staffers, Julie Greenwald, chairman/CEO of Warner-owned Atlantic Music Group, said, “The changes we’re making today are primarily happening in our radio and video teams.” And Lucian Grainge, Universal’s chairman/CEO, told staffers in January, before the latest layoffs, that the label would be “not just expanding geographically and leveraging new technologies” but “further evolve our organizational structure to create efficiencies in other areas of the business.”
From a practical standpoint, according to Diane Monk Harrison, a radio manager at Warner-owned distribution company WEA, who lost her job in mid-March, that meant the industry layoffs have been “disproportionately affecting radio promotion.” The broadcast business is shrinking: The biggest radio company, iHeartMedia, has been downsizing since the pandemic, including a recent wave in the last few weeks. That means fewer programmers exist for major labels to lobby for extra playlist adds. “Radio is still extremely important,” says Skip Bishop, a former longtime promotion executive at Sony and other labels who has been a consultant for more than a decade. “But it’s just an evolution. You don’t need six regionals, three nationals, two vps and an svp [at a label] when 20 to 45 people are making the decisions that 200 people used to make at radio.”
Adds a major-label source: “In the old world, you might have radio-promo people who were earning the same, or more, as the head of A&R. That’s not going to happen in the new world, for obvious reasons. What is happening is the labels are keeping the absolute very best radio people.”
As listeners have shifted away from old-school radio stations in favor of on-demand streaming, the radio business has declined: According to Nielsen Media Research data, weekly listenership dropped during the pandemic, from 89% of adult Americans in 2019 to 82% in 2022. The medium’s most resilient advertising area is in digital sales, a recent Radio Advertising Bureau and Borrell Associates study shows, and not in AM-FM airplay. “The only portion of radio that’s growing is not dependent on music,” says Gordon Borrell, CEO of Borrell Associates, an analyst group that focuses on media advertising and marketing. “I don’t think the record labels are daft of what has happened to the industry in terms of listeners, and they’re well aware of the aging nature of terrestrial radio programming.”
iHeartMedia has more than $5.2 billion in debt and has been laying off personnel over the last few years, including a wave of reported layoffs in early 2024. (Audacy, another broadcast giant, filed for bankruptcy in January, owing $2 billion in debt.) As the number of radio employees decreases, major label staff who attempt to influence them have made proportionate changes. “It makes sense to shrink your radio promotion when there’s less radio people to deal with,” says Don Cristi, a veteran radio programmer recently laid off as iHeartMedia’s senior vp of programming in Tulsa and Oklahoma City. “I dealt with way more ‘nationals’ in the last few years [from labels] than what used to be called your regional guy.”
And many independent artists are going around both labels and radio entirely, having “already done the heavy lifting” to break on TikTok and other social media, according to an indie R&B and hip-hop music executive. “Nothing will ever go back to the way it was just five years ago,” this person says. “A label may shift from promo field execs to mobile digital execs, just as radio is now relying on its digital real estate to generate additional revenue.”
Still, the radio business has shown resilience: 82% of U.S. listeners is no small number, and a recent Chartmetric study shows radio maintains a powerful ability to break hits. Stations aired 7.4 million songs roughly 102.4 times apiece, for a total of 755 million spins, in 2023, and the top 10 radio songs earned major streaming boosts. And while rock, pop and hip-hop artists have become less reliant on radio in recent years, some genres, including Latin and country, remain attached to radio. “Music companies continue to be very important strategic partners with the entire radio industry and there are no signs that is abating,” says Wendy Goldberg, iHeartMedia’s spokesperson, in a statement. “Labels rely on broadcast radio to break new artists, because in order to introduce new music to the masses, you need radio and its unparalleled reach.”
At many labels and artist management companies, radio and streaming teams are working in tandem, befitting the hit-breaking relevance of both media. “As for now, they’re both very valuable,” says Bob McLynn of Crush Music, which manages Miley Cyrus, Green Day, Fall Out Boy, Sia and others and employs radio and label veterans on its promo staff. “You could argue [radio] is not what it was 15 years ago. When you got a hit on radio, that was the all-being. Sometimes you used to lead with radio, and now radio comes later.”
Robust radio promotion departments have been expensive for labels to maintain: It costs money to send employees from New York, Los Angeles or Nashville to build relationships with programmers throughout the U.S. Still, these departments are where labels keep “boots on the ground,” as Monk Harrison calls them: employees with an understanding of how fans in Omaha or Detroit discover artists, attend shows and follow local entertainment from concerts to sports. “Relationships are still key and no algorithm can replace that,” says David Linton, a former executive at Capitol, Island and Arista who is a program director with jazz station WCLK in Atlanta.
Ed Brennan, who was Atlantic’s vp of alternative promotion until he lost his job in late February, plans to use these kinds of relationships to build his own company, White Leather Projects, potentially focusing on artist management, tour marketing and radio promotion. In the meantime, he’s concentrating on more important issues. “The first thing I did when I got the phone call that my position was to be eliminated, I volunteered to chaperone my son’s field trip at school. He’s 8,” Brennan says. “I’m excited about the unknown future.”
Additional reporting by Gail Mitchell.
Back in 2021, a major label kicked off a radio promotion campaign for a song from an arena-selling act. One of the label’s early moves was to earmark payments to an independent radio promoter tied to a pair of stations in the Northeast, as documented in an invoice reviewed by Billboard. During the chart week before the date of the invoice, the radio-tracking service Mediabase recorded no plays of the single in question on WXRV (Boston) and WNCS (Montpelier, Vermont). The following week — the invoice, which allocated $750 to the first station and $500 to the second, was dated to that Monday — spins increased markedly, rising by at least 15 on both.
This invoice is one of 14 obtained by Billboard from three different executives — one from a major label, one at an independent label and one who works in radio promotion — all of whom requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about radio promotion activities. (To preserve that anonymity, Billboard agreed not to identify the acts on these invoices.) These documents from 2021 and 2022 are detailed, containing the artist name, the single name, the radio station and the “rate” for each.
The invoices show how payments — which range from several hundred dollars to $1,500 — move from labels to one independent promoter, Jeff Deane, who runs the company Jeff Deane and Associates, apparently resulting in spins at specific stations. Analyzing Mediabase data shows that in the week those payments are invoiced, plays for the songs in question increased at the stations specified in 28 out of 30 cases. Deane’s practices have concerned some in the music industry, who appealed for government intervention last year, according to two sources.
All the invoices made out to Deane that were obtained by Billboard include the inscription, “Nothing of value was or will be given to a radio station or radio station employee in exchange for airplay.” Deane and one of his employees did not respond to multiple requests for comment — by email, phone, and two letters in the mail — about how his business works. Representatives for the three major label groups declined to comment.
The Federal Communications Commission allows paying for airplay as long as those payments are “disclose[d]… at the time material is aired and identify who is paying for it.” It’s unclear if any disclosures were made in the 30 cases documented on the invoices. In a statement to Billboard, Ed Flanagan, general manager of WNCS, said that “when WNCS or WXRV broadcasts programming that is sponsored by a third party, it is the practice of the station to ensure that such sponsored programming is broadcast in compliance with the FCC’s rules on sponsorship identification.”
In addition, following a mid-2000s investigation into radio promotion by the New York Attorney General’s office, then overseen by Eliot Spitzer, all the major labels agreed to certain business reforms. Key among them was not to use “commercial transactions,” “advertising,” or “nominal consideration,” among other things, “in an explicit or implicit exchange, agreement, or understanding to obtain airplay or increase airplay.”
Gabriel Rossman, a professor of sociology at UCLA and the author of Climbing the Charts: What Radio Airplay Tells Us About the Diffusion of Innovation, agreed to review redacted versions of the invoices and accompanying Mediabase reports for Billboard. “We see this pattern between the invoices and the Mediabase reports that JDA gets paid to promote a particular song on a particular station, and then in the week that follows the spins go up,” he says.
Rossman says that Deane’s activities could be aboveboard. “Is there a way to do that legally?” he asks. “In theory, you could do that by making a really good press kit or a really good PowerPoint [about how great the song on the invoice is]. If you had to bet, that’s probably not what happened. But in theory, that’s what the job of an independent promoter is: to give a very compelling endorsement. The evidence I saw doesn’t yet exclude the possibility that the promotional efforts they’re doing are legal.”
Independent Promotion
Independent promoters are a longstanding feature of the music industry. At any given time, label promotion departments are working multiple singles across a variety of radio formats — pop, alternative, or adult contemporary, for example — with the goal of pushing those songs up each format’s chart so that more listeners hear them. There are hundreds of stations that need to be called and persuaded to play a track. But there is only so much time in the day, so labels hire middlemen who typically have experience with and relationships in individual local markets to augment their own efforts. These are known as independent promoters.
“Some independent promoters enjoy exclusive arrangements with particular radio stations and are guaranteed regular, direct access to the programmers responsible for the all-important playlists,” the New York Attorney General’s office explained in documents from 2005 related to its radio promotion investigation. “… Other independent promoters, referred to as ‘retainer indies,’ are hired to promote a particular song and are paid a flat fee for the life of the project.”
Deane is one of several current indie promoters who works by establishing these “exclusive agreements” with stations, radio veterans say. In a 2013 lawsuit Deane filed against a radio company, Apex Broadcasting, the promoter’s attorney described the way he relies on “longstanding radio relationships to help artists receive meaningful radio airplay.” The mechanism that allows Deane to deliver that airplay for clients is partially outlined in the lawsuit: He “enters into exclusive agreements — having mostly one-year, but occasionally two-year, terms — with radio stations or entities that own and operate radio stations.” (Deane’s suit alleged that Apex breached its exclusive agreement with him; the dispute was later settled and the case dismissed with prejudice.)
“Deane secures promotional support for the radio stations he represents” in exclusive deals, “helping those stations garner listener loyalty, higher ratings, and increased advertising revenue,” according to documents the promoter’s attorney filed in the Apex Broadcasting suit.
This support is increasingly valuable to stations, especially in small markets, radio sources say, because they have lost a lot of the advertising dollars that traditionally kept them afloat. Over-the-air ad revenue fell by more than 40% between 2005 and 2020, according to a 2021 FCC filing from the National Association of Broadcasters.
In court filings from 2021, another independent promoter allegedly acknowledged that he had been paying “a budget set at $200,000” annually for three radio stations in California and Las Vegas. (That promoter said he “has not, did not, and never will participate in payola, and maintains full compliance with the FCC and regulations of the record industry.”) One radio executive who worked at a station in a deal with Deane said those exclusive agreements land the station “six figures a year.”
Promoters also stand to benefit financially from setting up these exclusive relationships. In the Apex Broadcasting suit, Deane’s attorney said that stations in contract with him turn over “first access to their playlist data, which Deane then analyzes for, and discusses with the record labels, who retain Deane to promote their artists’ music.” In a 2013 email that was part of the Apex suit, he said he worked with 50 stations in this fashion.
Overnight Spins
In some cases documented on the invoices, the label payments occur at the start of a radio campaign. Last year, for example, an invoice indicates that a label made payments to Deane tied to multiple stations, including WRTT (Huntsville, Ala.), KAZR (Des Moines, Iowa) and WFXH (Savannah, Ga.), for a platinum-selling rock band. In the 48 hours following the date on the label’s invoice, each of those stations started to play the band’s single, according to Mediabase data. Another band sent Deane a similar invoice in 2021 for the station KYMK (Lafayette, La.); Mediabase data show that the group earned its first spin on that station two days after the date of the invoice. (Employees of these four stations did not respond to email requests for comment.)
The timing of the plays is notable. The majority of them occurred overnight between midnight and 6 a.m., when few listeners are tuning in, according to information from Mediabase.
This is not a new phenomenon: The New York Attorney General’s office noted in 2005 that the major label groups aim “to generate additional spins detections by the airplay monitoring companies, even if the spins occur in the dead of night when relatively few people are listening to radio. Nighttime spins may still prove effective as a means to improve chart positions” — especially on charts that only rank songs by spins, rather than by audience impressions.
In a 2014 lawsuit Deane filed against another radio company, Advanced Media Partners, that also alleged breach of contract, his attorneys wrote that part of their agreement involved “provid[ing] designated overnight programming hours to JDA, which would then enable JDA to fund the promotional budget Defendants demanded, and realize substantial revenue from its record label clients.” Deane was allotted “the overnight hours of 1:00 a.m. to 5:00 a.m. on Saturday (Friday night) and Sunday (Saturday night) and from 12:00 a.m. (midnight) to 5:00 a.m. on Monday through Friday (Sunday – Thursday nights) to facilitate… interaction with record labels,” according to the lawsuit.
Deane’s interest in the overnight hours is well known enough in radio circles that it was the butt of a joke in the trade publication Hits Daily Double. “I just offered a roll of toilet paper to a PD [program director] for an add,” Hits wrote during the early days of the pandemic. “On Amazon, most paper products, if you can find them, are going for more than a Jeff Deane overnight five-spin special.”
Rossman, the UCLA professor, says that “if you’re trying to get something to rise in the charts, that’s exactly what you would do: Do whatever you could to get a song played in small markets overnight, because that’s the part [of the day] that people care the least about [what’s playing], and so [it] should be the easiest to influence.”
The New York Attorney General
Independent radio promotion has periodically come under scrutiny for its ties to payola, which was regulated by Congress in 1960.
Apex alluded to payola in its 2013 response to Deane’s lawsuit: “In the course of communicating with Deane and the record labels for promotion, Apex Broadcasting also learned that Deane’s practices violated industry standards, and Apex Broadcasting’s instructions, concerning radio promotion.” In emails that were part of the lawsuit, Deane’s attorney hit back, criticizing the company for “coyly suggesting my client engaged in payola — both in the Apex relationship and at some unspecified time in the past” but “refusing to provide any alleged facts.”
While Deane was not mentioned in the 2005 documents summarizing the Attorney General’s investigation, Spitzer’s office zeroed in on the activities of some independent promoters: “In an effort to dodge the payola laws, record labels and radio stations have also enlisted the services of so-called independent promoters… who act as conduits for delivery of the labels’ ‘promotional support’ to the stations and help perpetuate the fiction that this support is not actually being delivered by the labels in exchange for airplay and therefore does not violate the payola statutes.”
Spitzer subsequently imposed strict conditions on independent promoters’ activities when they worked with major labels: Record companies “shall not provide any item of value to an independent radio promoter to be distributed to Radio.” (Again, this language is echoed on Deane’s invoices: “Nothing of value was or will be given to a radio station or radio station employee in exchange for airplay.”)
On top of that, any indie promoters working with the majors are required to regularly certify in writing that they are complying with the rules laid out by Spitzer’s office. When Spitzer announced the implementation of these business reforms, he called them “a model for breaking the pervasive influence of bribes in the industry.”
But there is some disagreement about their ongoing effectiveness. Last year, frustrated music executives secured another meeting with the New York Attorney General’s office, now led by Letitia James, to complain about the practices of some independent promoters, according to two sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
During a meeting that included Elinor Hoffman, chief of the New York Attorney General’s antitrust bureau, and Jane Azia, chief of the New York Attorney General’s bureau of consumer frauds and protection, music executives mentioned Deane and others by name, according to sources present, alleging that their activities violated the terms of the settlement agreements. (James herself was not in the meeting.) And they asked the New York attorney general to investigate independent promotion’s links to payola, as Spitzer did nearly two decades ago.
The New York Attorney General’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
Universal Music Group, the country’s biggest record label, has recently taken steps to rein in the costs of radio campaigns, multiple sources tell Billboard. The move comes at a time when there is debate around the music industry about the most effective methods of spending marketing dollars and promoting a record, and traditional outlets — airplay, late-night television appearances, and even prominent playlisting on streaming services — don’t always drive engagement.
As many radio formats focused on new music are struggling, more label executives say it’s an open question whether paying big money for airplay is worth it. “The math is just not working,” according to one major label promotions executive outside of the UMG system.
Record companies have long supplemented their in-house radio departments with help from contractors, known as independent promoters. Working multiple songs in multiple formats across hundreds of stations around the country requires a lot of staff and local relationships. Indie promoters often cultivate those relationships with specific stations by region or format. Some operate on a retainer basis, charging a set amount for the duration of a promotional campaign. Others charge for each add they obtain for a song on station playlists, with costs ranging from a few hundred dollars to several thousand.
When it comes to the latter model, the world’s leading record company wants to limit the cost of adds, according to four veteran promotions executives. A rep for UMG declined to comment.
“It’s common knowledge Universal has drawn back” from spending as much on radio promotion, says Joey Carvello, a veteran who previously worked in-house for major labels and as an independent. “It’s a hot topic,” adds Daniel Glass, founder of Glassnote Records, who notes that Universal’s new approach was “being spoken about everywhere” at an industry event earlier this year in Los Angeles.
Major labels have attempted to limit the cost of radio campaigns multiple times over the years. More than four decades ago, Billboard’s Nov. 8, 1980 issue reported that labels in the Warner Music Group system were looking to “realize as much as $3 [million] to $6 million a year in savings by dropping their outside promotion help.” Today, a label aiming to get to the top of the mainstream R&B/hip-hop airplay chart is going to need to budget more than $100,000, executives say; in some cases, a pop campaign can cost over $300,000.
Past efforts by the majors to curb promotion costs were often undone by the necessity of radio exposure. The key difference nowadays is streaming’s ability to mint major artists with little or no radio play. Take 23-year-old rapper Youngboy Never Broke Again: Only Drake and Taylor Swift earned more streams in 2022, according to Luminate, but Youngboy has only ever cracked Billboard‘s all-genre Radio Songs chart once — as a featured act.
Streaming now accounts for 84% of U.S. music industry revenues, according to the RIAA’s 2022 year-end report. And it’s not always clear, even to the people in radio, that airplay drives more streams.
A 2021 report by the market research company MusicWatch found that streaming and listening on social media accounted for 46% of survey respondents’ weekly listening, while AM/FM radio accounted for 16%. A survey by MIDiA Research last year found that YouTube was the leading source of music discovery. And for the all-important Gen Z, TikTok was in second place.
MusicWatch’s study also indicated that streaming dominated lean-in listening — YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music accounted for 56% of this activity, as compared to 13% for broadcast radio. That’s important because lean-in listeners are likely to be more active fans, who might be inclined to buy tickets or vinyl or sweatshirts from an artist they love.
In this environment, a major-label radio promotion executive complained last year that the cost of airplay may not make economic sense. He recalls needing to spend $3,000 to get a song into rotation in a small city. That airplay would need to drive around a million streams in that area alone “to justify that expense,” he said. The city’s population was less than 150,000 people.
Of course, not everyone in the music industry feels the same. “At the end of the day, radio makes pop stars,” Carvello says. And Midia’s survey found that, outside of Gen Z, radio was the number two source of music discovery after YouTube.
Glassnote — the independent label home to Phoenix and Mumford & Sons — has no plans to change its radio strategy, according to Glass: “Independent promotion has been very important to the growth of Glassnote over the years. We’re not going to change our loyalty.”
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