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 Setting Up Radio Interviews
by Bryan Farrish
Back to The
Academy
After your airplay for your song/album is progressing, radio interviews are a great way to make use of the fact
that the stations are liking your material. Also, as opposed to touring, interviews can be done on the phone, which
means a lot of ground can be covered... even in a single day. And if the artist is in the vicinity of a station
that is playing the material, then in-person interviews (drop-by's) can be scheduled too.
Setting up the radio interviews is the difficult part. If you have a promoter handling your airplay, they should
be able to handle it. However, since the artist's schedule of availability must be matched to the stations', a
large number of interviews in a given week (say, 10 to 30) is going to require the cooperation of the promoter,
the artist, and at least one assistant who can pre-call the stations.
The trick with setting up the interviews is to make best use of the artist's time. If not scheduled properly, the
artist will be waiting by the phone for hours, or will have to make 20 calls just to get one interview completed.
At this rate you will be worn-out before you get anything accomplished.
Here is the process: Your
promoter fishes through the list of playing stations for folks that are amenable to the idea of an upcoming interview.
The promoter uses as many tools as are available for this, including tapes, pictures and transcripts of previous
station interviews, along with letters of reference from those stations. The idea is to get the prospective stations
to believe that the artist will make for a good phone (or in-person) guest, because the last thing a station needs
is for a troublemaker or a boring guest to ruin their sound. Of course, follow-up interviews with same stations
will be much easier, provided they liked you the first time around.
Once willing-stations are found (which takes weeks), the scheduling can be done in one of two ways. Either the
artist can supply the promoter with an "availability" schedule (where the promoter uses it to match to
the stations,) or the promoter can get station-opportunity "windows", and give these to the artists to
finalize. Either way, you need a lot of approved-interview stations because of the difficulty of...
Making contact:
This is the step that has to occur in real-time. In order to have more than one or two interviews in a single day,
the artist must have one or more assistants pre-calling the approved stations, so that the appropriate people can
be gotten on the line. Sometimes it takes many calls to get through because they ask you to call the request line.
Make sure you get multiple phone numbers (three) for each station, so you can get through when you need to.
Then there is the holding time. Remember, you will be calling into live shows that have other segments occurring
during your call. So someone has to wait on hold until your segment comes up. This holding time can be from a few
minutes to three hours PER station. So the best technique is to have multiple assistants holding on multiple phones,
so that when the artist finishes up with one interview, the next one will be ready to connect.
A typical scenario might be:
The promoter provides you with 40 interview requests over a period of three days. You have four helpers pre-calling
on four phones, each one giving the signal when a station is on the line and ready. 10 of the interviews fall through,
but the remaining 30 get completed in the three days. However, if the artist tries to work without helpers, he/she
may only complete 6 in the same three days... all the while spending the same amount of time on the phone... dialing
and holding.
Bryan Farrish
is an independent radio airplay promoter. He can be reached at 818-905-8038 or at radio-media.com |
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