Inside the Control Room: 4 Submission Tips from Our Curators

If you’re an artist looking to get your music on the airwaves, you already know the market is flooded. Every single week, our curation team sifts through mountains of tracks to find the perfect fits for our station.

Want to stand out in the pile? Here are four straightforward tips directly from our music directors to help you get noticed.

1. Fill Out Your DSP Bios (Seriously, It’s Free)

Knowing who you are, where you’re from, and what makes you tick goes a long way when we evaluate your music. It isn’t just about the songwriting and performance; presenting our listeners with a great story tidbit is a massive plus.

• Embrace your roots: We focus heavily on Columbia, the state of South Carolina, and music from across the Southeast. There is zero shame in stating exactly where you are from. In fact, anywhere but Nashville is a major selling point for us.

• No excuses: Bio sections on streaming platforms are free real estate. Use them. If writing isn’t your strength, feed your details into an AI chat engine to generate a rough draft. Review it, have a friend look it over, tweak it, and post it.

2. Get a Website (For the Bots, Not the Fans)

Websites are low-cost and can be incredibly simple—but you need a custom domain. While human fans might not visit it daily, search engine bots from Google and Bing absolutely do.

A public website is critical for hosting the non-visible structured data that search engines crave. We often see artists search for themselves using AI, only to complain that AI is “stupid” because it gets their facts wrong. The reality? You haven’t told the internet who you are. Hosting a metadata schema on your own website (not just on social media) solves this instantly.

3. Keep It Cool (And Manage Expectations)

We receive a massive volume of unsolicited music. Much of it falls outside our format or our geographic region. Because our team wears multiple hats and works under tight deadlines, we simply don’t have the bandwidth to handhold or reply to every inquiry.

• Don’t take a ‘no’ personally: If we decline a submission, it just means it isn’t the right fit for this exact moment.

• The one-play reality: Sometimes we play a track once, and we don’t know if or when it will spin again. If we love a track and the audience reaction is great, it goes into heavier rotation. If the audience doesn’t respond, we move on.

Keep creating and working hard. At the end of the day, music should satisfy you, not us.

4. Give Us the Right Tech

High-quality audio makes a massive difference. We highly appreciate files sent as 320kbps MP3s or 16-bit/44.1kHz WAV files.

While MP3s are standard for quick listening, WAV is the broadcast gold standard. Our intake infrastructure stores everything in WAV format anyway, so delivering it that way from the jump helps us get your music into our system much faster.