Non-Commercial Radio Promotion for Music

Planetary Group has been helping brands and musicians get radio airtime since 1996. We develop specific, targeted campaigns based on your goals to help you access regional and even national radio stations. We solicit radio stations to play your music, offer feedback, and we even set up interviews that align with your touring markets.

You have enough to worry about as a musician and a content creator; that’s why Planetary Group offers a simple, easy-to-use radio promotion service that you can trust. We work with musicians from all genres and experience levels, from up-and-coming artists to more seasoned professionals. We guarantee to provide you with the exposure you deserve.

Our radio department develops campaigns that target college radio, AAA, non-commercial, public radio, and commercial specialty shows. In this section, we will give you an overview of our non-commercial radio promotional campaigns.

What Is the Non-Commercial Radio Format?

Commercial radio stations derive their budget almost exclusively from selling advertising on their networks, compared to their non-commercial counterparts (also known as non-comm) who, while they do run some ads on the air, also rely on listener contributions or subsidies from a university or government source.

Since commercial radio stations need a huge amount of listeners in order to justify their ad prices, you’ll often notice that they are more structured and rigid in the type of music they’ll play. This often means there’s less of a chance to pitch new music and artists.

Non-commercial radio stations often have much more freedom in the genres of music they put on the air.

What Kind of Music Does Non-Commercial Radio Play?

“Non-Commercial” refers to a large number of radio stations, including local NPR affiliates, college, and community-based radio. In the United States, you’ll often find these stations on the left side of your radio dial — typically frequencies between 87 and 92 MHz are reserved for educational, community, and non-commercial use.

Due to this diversity, these stations are much more prone to playing music by new artists. Typically with commercial radio, new music is only released through working carefully with labels and local venues, so they tend to feature less programming focused on new artists.

Due to the sheer amount of community radio stations, you can almost guarantee that all genres of music have a home somewhere within the non-commercial radio sphere. For genres like indie, rock, folk, singer-songwriter, and even electronic music, you’ll find multiple college radio stations providing a place for our promotions team to reach out.

How Does Our Process Work?

First we will need to listen to your release to determine if it’s something that aligns with the non-commercial outlets we target. If so, then we will reach out to you to discuss your goals and touring plans so that we can create a customized, targeted campaign that works for you.

Radio campaigns typically run 6–8 weeks, where Planetary Group is actively soliciting radio stations for airtime and feedback, saving you time and energy.

What You Need to Provide

You’ll need to provide us with digital tracks or albums of your music, along with a brief bio to help provide some background for your work to the stations.

For regional campaigns, our team would be personally reaching out to between 150–200 radio stations, and around 300+ for national campaigns. We will let you know the exact amount when we discuss your customized promotional plan.

What Planetary Group Delivers

• A specific, targeted non-commercial radio promotion campaign based on your needs
• Weekly status reports with radio feedback, pulled from our website
• Tour support promotion to ensure advance exposure in your pending tour markets
• Peace of mind — knowing that Planetary is adept at taking music of nearly every stripe to the radio

A Final Word About Non-Commercial Promotion

Writing, recording, and releasing your music is hard enough without thinking of the time and effort it takes to promote it. Let Planetary Group ease your stress by managing your non-commercial radio promotion campaign, that way you can get back to what really matters to you — creating fantastic music for everyone to enjoy!