From The Desk Of...

Commercial Radio

Commercial radio is radio that derives its operating budget from selling advertising, or in other words, selling radio commercials. This advertising income is how the station pays it business expenses and makes money. Unlike non-commercial radio, revenue from other avenues does not play a central role in the station operating budget.

As a radio listener, it's clear when you've got a commercial radio station on the dial for the simple reason that you hear a lot of advertising. As someone promoting to radio, the distinction between commercial radio and non-commercial radio comes down to much more than a barrage of ads for weight loss products and local auto shops. From a promotion standpoint, you have to approach these stations in different ways, and usually at different stages in a career.

Why so different? It all comes down to those advertising fees. A commercial radio station must be in constant pursuit of ratings in order to maintain - and increase - the rates they are able to charge their advertisers for airtime. These fees are directly tied to ratings, because the more listeners the station reaches, the more valuable a commercial on their station becomes.

To get these ratings, commercial radio stations have to be very careful when they draw up their playlists. They need to be playing songs that have appeal to the widest number of people, and songs that the biggest number of people in their area will be requesting and hoping to hear. These criteria usually boil down to commercial stations shying away from playing new artists, unless they are backed with a big budget promotional campaign. In other words, yes, this is why all the songs on the radio sound the same and why the same songs keep getting played over and over.

To help them make decisions about which songs to play, stations work with labels and promoters to get a better idea of how a song/artist is going to be marketed. They want to know things like:

• Will the song be available to purchase both digitally and in local stores?
• Will there be national and local reviews for the song/album?
• Will the artist be playing locally? Will they be available to the station for interviews/on-air performances?
• Will there be local advertising?
• Will the song be involved in any national media campaigns, films, television shows or other media?

As you'll note, all of these questions help the radio stations develop an understanding of how else and where else their listeners might encounter a song. The more the exposure to the song, the more the station will be convinced that playing it will increase their ratings, since it will be familiar to their listeners. 

Of course, commercial radio stations do consider things like genre and make sure that the songs they playlist fit their formats, but they do so will all of the other factors in mind - in other words, they pick songs that fit their formats AND meet their ratings criteria.

For these reasons, commercial radio stations are not usually the first entry into the world of radio musicians. Non-commercial radio has much more flexibility in their playlists and are more able to give non-major label backed up and coming artists a break. They are also able to play a wider breadth of genres that may have niche followings that commercial radio just can't support.

Commercial radio stations do often have specialty shows on which they feature music that they don't think meets their usual criteria but that they'd like to play. However, keep in mind that a play on a specialty show doesn't automatically translate into a play during the station's typical format shows - in fact, usually a play on a specialty show is a signal that you don't fit the station's format at all.

Last but not least, to promote to commercial radio, you need to understand their market structure. Learn more about that here, in What Are Radio Markets?.