Q: I’ve recently finished an album which is about to be released and I’d love your opinion. Could I send you a copy?

A: Could you do us a favour and recommend your two favourite tracks  to my show via tinyurl.com/recommendmusic – that way they’ll get logged and the whole programme team will be able to hear them. We’ll definitely listen to your music and consider it for airplay. For our show there’s no need to send a CD as well – we simply wouldn’t have time to listen to it.

Hopefully you already have your release strategy for the album all worked out and don’t need any advice from the likes of me, in which case you can safely stop reading here…

Otherwise, my first tip would be: whatever kind of release you’re envisaging I’d strongly recommend doing a simultaneous release on Bandcamp. This gives digital customers the option of buying it in lossless quality, and you’ll earn a higher percentage of the purchase price than you’ll get on iTunes etc. The other advantage is that you can also use Bandcamp to sell physical CDs, T-Shirts etc

Tip Number Two concerns promotion. I don’t know much about getting reviewed and embedded on the blogs, only that it matters enormously. But for radio promotion I’d advise a dual strategy of a) direct email with links to the streaming audio on Soundcloud or Bandcamp and b) also sending white label promo CDs in the post and following them up by phone and email.  Focus your efforts on just one lead track at a time, set a release or “focus” date for the track and make sure you sticker the CD sleeves properly.

See this article for detailed advice on how to send CDs to radio.

So far so standard. But Tip Number Three is more controversial – and concerns the fact that your album tracks are all five or six minutes long. If any of your strongest songs could conceivably be shortened into a “radio edit” without losing their  essence, then you might want to consider doing so.

Not everyone agrees – in fact my BBC Introducing colleague Jen Long violently disagrees with this advice. I do fully understand all the arguments about art, longform music, and how one shouldn’t pander to present day ADHD attention spans. Far be it from me to influence your artistic choices – but I do feel you need to be fully informed when making them.

And here, in my experience, is a simple, observable fact: a great song that’s just over 2 minutes long is twice as likely to get a spot play as a great song that’s just over four minutes. It’s important to stress both songs have to be equally great for this to be true.

The reason it’s true is that music radio is usually divided up into half-hour “clocks”, separated by news bulletins etc. Allowing for these, the available time in each segment comes down to around 28 minutes – and you can allow up to a minute on average for links between songs.  So in each half hour segment the producer can fit in a maximum of:
* five 5 minute songs
* six 4 minute songs
* seven/eight 3 minute songs
* or NINE two-and-a-half minute songs

In the real world, live radio shows always overrun – so let’s suppose it’s coming up to 28 minutes past the hour, and the news is due at half past. The producer will have to drop that 6 minute Radiohead track and look for something in a hurry that’s equally good but very much shorter. If your new single happens to be not only brilliant but 2:10 long, then it’ll be you that gets the airplay rather than your equally brilliant competitor whose song is double the length.

I agree with Jen that it would be great if this wasn’t the case. What you do about it – if anything – is entirely up to you.