Submitting Music to Digital Blues

Your music is the lifeblood of Digital Blues and all those other great radio shows out there.

 

I welcome the opportunity to give radio exposure to all blues or blues based artists, whether they are just starting out, well established or mega-stars, unsigned or signed and I thank all those individuals, bands, PR and promotions folk, record labels and everyone else who provide music for Digital Blues. Indeed you are our raison d’être!! Without you the Digital Blues radio shows would be very ordinary and might well not exist at all!

Submitting music to Digital Blues

If you want to submit music to Digital Blues for airplay or airplay consideration then please bear in mind that for the reasons set out below I ONLY ACCEPT CDs, NO DOWNLOADS. Contact me at music@digitalblues.co.uk for the mailing address etc.

Please do not send CDs to any of the radio stations on which Digital Blues is broadcast as I am rarely, if ever, at the studios and so CDs that arrive there, have to be posted on to me and will take a long while to get to me, if they do at all! They may also incur customs duties and taxes which I will not pay so they will never reach me! Blame Brexit not me!

But before you do that, please read what follows which I do not want to be seen as a rant or anything similar as I very much welcome music submissions. But I do ask that you consider and take account of my comments, reasons and requests.

Format

Digital Blues’ shows are prepared and recorded in a small studio in my home so, unlike many of my blues radio  colleagues, I do not have expensive play-out software nor do I prepare programs on a computer. I record them, as if I were broadcasting live (as anyone who has listened will know!!), using my CD players, mixing desk etc. direct to a laptop and the recording is then uploaded via the internet to the various stations and as a podcast to Mixcloud.

I cannot accept submissions other than physical CDs which I know is a bugbear to many of you.

With a CD, I can use it immediately plus I get the track listing, timings (if you have included them on the sleeve), writing credits, info about the musicians etc. none of which is usually included with downloads. There is also no substitute for actually having your product in my hands! In addition, this means I can choose the tracks I play from the whole selection on the CD.

Why not send me mp3’s

Many of you want to submit content electronically (MP3, WAV etc.) as this is your cheapest option and you can decide what tracks you want to submit. Whilst I fully appreciate your reasoning for this, please bear in mind that for every electronic submission you make, I have to:

  • download it to my computer
  • burn it to disk
  • create a track listing, with timings etc.
  • print off the track listing
  • visit your website to try to obtain some info about you and your music
  • put the whole package together in a jewel case

On average, this takes at least half an hour per disk, often longer.nI am frequently offered 30 or more downloads per week. To get these to the stage where I can use them in a broadcast, for each download I would have to purchase the blank disks, the jewel cases etc. and spend time doing all the things I detail above!! This is on top of preparing and recording my show each week together with all the promotion of the shows etc. Do the math as our American cousins love to say!!!

I am not paid to do what I do, indeed, as can be seen from the above, I subsidize what I do out of my own pocket! I know times are very tough for most musicians but ask that you remember that times are tough for us all and I do not have any income stream that I can use to defray my costs.

I am sorry but no CD, no airplay!

Content

Given the amount of material received, you will readily appreciate that there are not enough hours in the day to listen to the whole of every CD submitted (I do have a life outside Digital Blues even if my wife is sometimes not convinced of this!!).

Therefore, like many of my colleagues, I can only dip into CDs and pick a track or two that have ‘immediate’ appeal etc. I do not necessarily have the chance to listen to the whole of those tracks so it would be very much appreciated if you could flag up tracks that may have language that may be considered ‘offensive’ or ‘adult’.

Sadly even the most innocuous sounding tracks can and do unexpectedly contain explicit language (God knows why as it adds nothing to the song) and only recently I had to fade a track by a significant artist early because of excessive and gratuitous use of the F-word!

UK radio stations, in particular, are monitored and can get into big trouble, be fined heavily and even lose their license if material broadcast causes complaints and is considered offensive or obscene. Equally, if Digital Blues attracted complaints of this sort, it would quickly be taken off the air and I would no longer be able to share with the world the wonderful music you are making.

Genre

Finally, a little reminder that Digital Blues does what it says on the box, plays blues although I have a very broad view of what falls within that categorization! It may seem obvious but you would be surprised how much music I receive or am offered that could not, even stretching a point as I often do, remotely be considered to be blues, blues based, blues influenced etc.

So, please don’t contact me about off genre content. Save your time and money (and mine!).

Thank you for reading this far and thank you in advance for bearing the above in mind. If some of it seems harsh or demanding, please remember that I, and the vast majority of my blues radio colleagues, do what we do for the love of the music and as a result of a passionate desire to spread the word about the great bands and artists there are out there.

Thank you for staying with this!! And thank you for taking note!! And thank you for the music!!