...and so it continues....
Since so many of you had questions last week about what exactly radio “adds” are & what they mean to the overall picture, i thought I’d collect some info for you..
Here’s an excerpt from Bryan Farrish on what exactly the CMJ is and means…
—————————————————-
Let’s now focus on a chart… the CMJ college airplay chart, which is a great place for most new artists and labels to begin (provided, that your genre is suitable!)
CMJ is the “College Music Journal” or “College Media Journal”, depending on whom you ask. For us, it stands for music.
CMJ (and college music in general) is about 75% alternative. Indeed, the first chart we want to look at (and the main chart in CMJ) is the “Top 200″, which is 200 listings deep of alternative charting artists (compared to 40 or 50 of other charts). 200 might seem like a lot, but on any given week, over 2000 artists are attempting to chart (and don’t.) There are about 1000 college stations which are eligible to send their playlists to CMJ to be included in the Top 200 chart. About 350 to 600 do it on any given week.
Like Billboard but for college radio...
A companion to the Top 200 chart is the “Radio 200 Adds” chart. An “add” chart is different from an “airplay” chart, because at non-commercial radio, an “add” just means a station “added you to the music library”…it does not mean they gave you any spins (airplay). Getting an add is usually the first step to getting spins, however.
Most artists are familiar with CMJ, [College Music Journal], and the Radio 200 chart as well as the other CMJ specialty radio charts. [RPM (Electronic), Hip Hop, Loud Rock and World.] Many new artists desperately want to chart in CMJ. As that often opens some big doors for some lucky artists … and this is the base starting point of most indie radio campaigns, since the radio stations who are sent the music are generally CMJ Reporting stations.
It is also good to keep in mind that these stations can only submit 30 albums to be included in the calculation for the Radio 200 chart each week; and only 10 albums on each of the various specialty charts! On another side note, each station is weighted depending on various factors such as programming, wattage, and market. [On some of the heavily weighted stations like KEXP, KCRW,WFMU and WRAS, it is a pretty big deal to get spun even once ... let alone make their Top 30 chart as a brand new artist. As these big tastemaker stations are known to pass on an established artist's album if their programmers are not into it.]