Song Submission Guide for Artists

If you are an artist, this page is for you. Everything else on this site is written for the person building the station. This one is for the person on the other side of the submission lane - the email inbox, the contact form, the DM.

I have been on the receiving side for years. A chunk of submissions goes to trash by reflex - if you do not give a fuck, me neither. Deleted in seconds. Not because the music was bad. Because the package was lazy. It is even harsher on automated stations. Lazy tracks never reach the human.

The music director has no obligation to fix your metadata. The rotation runs fine without you. If your track cannot drop into the library clean, it does not get added. The artists who get airplay are not the ones with the best track. They are the ones who made it easy to add the track to the library.

This page is how you make it easy. Nothing below is an extra requirement. You do it once and reuse the same package across radio, Spotify, Tidal, Bandcamp, and everywhere else.

Research the station before you send

A punjabi pop track in a rock and metal station's inbox. An Ibiza Balearic scene single sent to a hardcore station. The package can be perfect. The genre is wrong. Spam, trash, deleted in two seconds.

You did not lose the slot. You shot yourself in the foot. The next track you send, even if it fits, lands in the trash folder the previous one defined.

Filename - ASCII only

The first thing a station sees is your filename. Not your music. Your filename.

Every piece of radio software on the planet was built by English-speaking engineers for an English-language catalog. RadioDJ, RCS Zetta, GSelector, the ingest pipelines stitched around them - in the early days of computerized radio automation, the software broke on tracks with non-ASCII characters. Sometimes silently. Sometimes loud. Either way, your file becomes a problem to solve before it becomes music to play.

The rule is simple. Transliterate everything outside basic ASCII before you send the file.

ŠŅK - Oportūniste.flac   →   SNK - Oportuniste.flac

Diacritics out. Cyrillic out. Emoji out. Exclamation marks and question marks out. Any kind of quotes out. Hyphens, periods, parentheses, ASCII letters and digits are safe. That is it.

The artist name on the file is the filesystem-safe version. The artist name inside the metadata can still be the real one. The file is for the machine. The tag is for the listener.

Do not strip the artist name. Do not prepend a track number. Do not append a master version.

A few trash-ready examples:

MASTER 57.WAV
01.mp3
†h∑ £ø√∑ ¡N∫¡D∑.flac

Format - FLAC or WAV

Send lossless. FLAC if you can. WAV if you must. MP3 CBR 320kbps is also acceptable, but keep in mind radio is not a lossless medium.

MP3 is a delivery format, not a submission format. A station re-encodes for streaming anyway, and re-encoding a track that was already lossy gives you compounding artifacts. Send the source and let the station make its own delivery copies.

FLAC has one structural advantage over WAV. It carries metadata inside the file. WAV does not, so a WAV submission needs a sidecar text file alongside the audio - same base filename, .txt extension, one field per line in the form TITLE=Oportūniste. Both formats work. FLAC is less to lose.

Stereo, 44.1kHz, 16-bit only. Older radio automation software has a history of producing white noise on bit-depth mismatches - it may be fixed in current versions, but this is not the field to test it.

Embedded metadata

Every track ships with these fields, in the file or in the sidecar:

• Title - the name of the song
• Artist - the canonical artist name, as you want it on the lock screen
• Album - the release the song belongs to
• Year - the recording year
• Copyright - the owner (label, your own publishing, however it actually reads on the contract)
• Composers - the author (lyricist, arranger, composer)
• ISRC - the recording identifier

The ISRC is the one that matters most. It is the only field that survives every downstream system unchanged - the scheduler, the API, the licensing report you never see. Titles get reformatted. Artist names get fought over (SNK, ŠŅK, Snk, S.N.K. all happen). The ISRC is the single thread that ties your recording to airplay logs and royalty payments - your income.

If you have not registered an ISRC yet, get one before you submit. A track without an ISRC will play, but it will not pay - because nothing can prove it was yours.

Do not play around with ISRC formatting. The ISRC is 12 characters, no hyphens. It may be displayed as CC-XXX-YY-NNNNN, but submitting it that way can make the track invisible on some systems.

For example, Spotify and Instagram both let you search tracks by ISRC with isrc:CCXXXYYNNNNN. There is a known case with the Latvian band PND - their track Meitene shows up on Spotify with ISRC GB-SMU-23-19353, so you will never find it on Spotify by its real ISRC GBSMU2319353, and the same track is unfindable on Instagram by either form.

Where to actually write the metadata

The tags are not magic. You type them into one of three places.

Option 1: your DAW's export dialog. Logic Pro, Ableton Live, Reaper, FL Studio, Pro Tools - all of them have a metadata panel in the bounce/export window. Title, artist, album, year, ISRC go in there before you click export. The file comes out tagged. This is the cleanest path because the file is correct the moment it leaves your studio.

If your DAW does not have an ISRC field (some do not), use Option 2 to add it after.

Option 2: a dedicated tag editor, after export. The standard tools are free:

• Mp3tag (Windows / macOS) - the workhorse. Open a folder, edit fields in a panel, save. Handles FLAC, WAV, MP3, M4A.
• MusicBrainz Picard (Windows / macOS / Linux) - heavier, has lookup features, free.
• kid3 (Windows / macOS / Linux) - lightweight, free.
• Metadatics (macOS) - free, native Mac app.

Open the file, fill the fields named in the section above, save. Done.

Option 3: a sidecar TXT file, last resort. If your DAW outputs plain WAV that does not carry embedded tags, write a .txt file next to the audio with the same base filename. The file looks exactly like this:

TITLE=Oportūniste
ARTIST=ŠŅK
ALBUM=Pats Vainīgs!
DATE=2021
TRACKNUMBER=3
COPYRIGHT=Omes Dzīvoklis
ISRC=QZRP42190003

One field per line. UPPERCASE field name, equals sign, value. UTF-8 encoded. No quotes, no commas, no Markdown. This is the exact format the FLAC Vorbis Comment standard uses, which means a station can import the file directly into a FLAC with one command:

metaflac --import-tags-from="SNK - Oportuniste.txt" "SNK - Oportuniste.flac"

Field names follow the Vorbis Comment vocabulary - DATE (not YEAR), TRACKNUMBER (not TRACK). Tag editors map your DAW's "Year" field to DATE and "Track" to TRACKNUMBER automatically, but the sidecar TXT bypasses that translation layer.

Pick one method and commit to it. Mixing approaches is how fields get half-set, half-missing, and Spotify ends up showing one tag while the station library shows another.

Cover art - JPEG, 3000x3000

One image. JPEG. 3000 pixels square.

3000 is not arbitrary. It is the largest size every now-playing surface scales down cleanly. Lock screens, CarPlay, Android Auto, web players, the station's own social cards - all of them resize down from the master. None of them upscale from a 600px thumbnail without it looking like a 2003 forum avatar.

Send one 3000x3000 JPEG per release. Not per track. The album art is per release, the metadata says which track is which.

Lyrics file - not required, but it gets you read

Send a plain text file with the lyrics. Oportuniste (Lyrics).txt next to the audio.

A station does not always have time to listen to a submission end to end. With lyrics on disk, the editor can scan for profanity in seconds. That is the gate between "rotation candidate" and "delete." On many stations, no lyrics file means no quick read, which means no decision, which means no airplay.

Lyrics also help the now-playing surface if you ever want to feed them through to a lyrics overlay. That is bonus. The real reason is the gate.

Clean version - not optional if there is profanity

If your track has explicit lyrics, you ship a clean version. Not as a favor. As a requirement.

Radio stations cannot play explicit content during dayparts where children might be listening. That is regulation in most countries and editorial policy in the rest. No clean version means your track gets locked out of every prime-time slot - which is most of the slots that matter. The "Radio Edit" exists for a reason. It is the version that gets airplay during the hours people actually listen.

Mix it. Mute the words, replace them, reverse them, whatever fits the song. The station does not care which technique you used. It cares that there is a version it can play before 9pm.

You can get creative with it. Swap the words around the rhythm instead of muting them. A good radio edit feels like a different song that happens to share a vocal take.

Instrumental version - bonus content

The instrumental is not required, but it opens doors the song version cannot.

A clean instrumental is the version a station can use as a podcast bed, an intro under a station ID, a bumper between tracks, or background for an editorial cut. None of that pays you directly. All of it puts your name on the air in places the song version would not reach.

If you can render an instrumental, send it. The cost is one extra export. The upside is your music in production beds you never had to negotiate for. You can license it separately so gamers, streamers, and podcasters can use it. That is extra income on work you already finished.

The ideal package

This is what excellence looks like. One folder. Everything inside.

SNK - Oportuniste/
├── SNK - Oportuniste.flac
├── SNK - Oportuniste (Radio Edit).flac
├── SNK - Oportuniste (Instrumental).flac
├── Oportuniste (Lyrics).txt
└── Oportuniste.jpg

A station that opens this package has nothing to fix. The track drops into the library. The metadata feeds the rotation, the API, the lock screen, the licensing report. The clean version unlocks the prime-time slots. The instrumental sits in the bumper pool. The cover art renders on every surface.

That is the difference between "we will consider it" and "it is in the rotation by Friday."

Distribution - airplay is only half the job

A perfect submission package gets you into the rotation. That is half the work. The other half is what happens after a listener hears your track on radio and reaches for their phone.

If they cannot find you anywhere else, the airplay evaporates. No save, no follow, no ticket, no merch, no DJ pulling the track for a club night next month. Radio is a discovery layer. It only converts if the rest of the stack is there to catch the discovery.

Here is the minimum stack. The artists who grew from airplay had all four of these. The artists who did not, did not.

Bandcamp - make the song buyable

Put the song or the album on Bandcamp.

Bandcamp is the cheapest, fairest distribution layer that exists for an independent artist. The cut to the platform is small, the payout is fast, and the listener pays you directly. More importantly, the act of being purchasable is what separates an indie artist from noise on a hard drive. If there is no way to buy your music, there is no signal that anyone - including you - takes it seriously as a release.

A Bandcamp page is also a clean link to put in the show notes when a station plays you. Bandcamp is your web page if you have none. There is no sale without a product to buy - and that conversion path does not exist if there is no page.

Instrumental - license it, do not bury it

You already exported the instrumental for the submission package. Do not let it sit on a drive.

The instrumental version is a reusable revenue surface. It can be licensed for streaming, sync, podcast beds, intros, station IDs, video backgrounds. The stems exist. The export is done. Every additional use is pure upside on work you already finished. List it. Price it. Make it findable.

YouTube - lyric video at the minimum

Put your songs on YouTube. A full music video if you have the budget. A lyric video if you do not. Audio over a static cover image if even that is too much. Something has to be there.

YouTube is the world's biggest music search engine. The search behavior that used to go to Google now goes there - someone hears a song, opens YouTube, types the title. If your track is not on the platform, that entire discovery path never happens. The listener bounces and forgets. You did not lose the fan because they did not like the music. You lost them because the search returned nothing.

Spotify and Tidal - two platforms, two jobs

Both are must-haves. They do different work.

Spotify is for listeners. It is the listener-side directory layer. When someone hears you on the radio and wants to save the track for later, Spotify is the first app they open. No Spotify page, no save, no algorithmic surfacing to the next listener, no playlist add. You are invisible to the largest passive-discovery loop in music.

Tidal is for DJs. This one most artists miss. Tidal is the streaming source that the major DJ software reads natively - rekordbox, Serato. When a DJ wants to drop your track at a party, Tidal is the platform they pull it from in real time without managing a local file. If you are not on Tidal, the DJ cannot play you in a club, full stop. They will play something else.

Spotify gets you the bedroom listener. Tidal gets you the dancefloor. You need both.

The Serj Tankian story - from inside the station

I have to say this plainly because every station operator I know has lived it.

If we cannot buy your music, we will pirate it. Thank you, music industry.

Here is what that means from inside a station. We need files. The rotation runs on files. When a song is geo-restricted, pulled from every store in our region, or never released through a buyable channel, the legal path does not exist - and the file still has to come from somewhere. So it comes from somewhere else. Grey channel, ripped stream, friend's hard drive. The track plays. The royalties still land in the artist's account - airplay reporting runs on ISRC, not on where the file came from. What the artist does not get is the rest of the signal. No sale data, no follow on Spotify, no DJ pull from Tidal, no Bandcamp transaction tying a listener to a country. The money trickles in from the radio side. The buying audience stays invisible.

The Serj Tankian catalog is the example I keep coming back to. Tracks listed for sale on 7digital that cannot actually be purchased from most of the world. The buy button is there. The transaction fails. The station still wants the track. Guess what happens.

You, the artist, control which version of this story plays out. Bandcamp, YouTube, Spotify, Tidal - that is the lever. Skip them and you are forcing the same outcome on yourself that Serj's catalog forces on us. Cover the four and we play you legally, we report you correctly, you get paid. It is that mechanical.

From the artist side this all collapses to one line - distribution is the lever that decides whether radio plays you legally or illegally.

There are too many ways to distribute music in 2026 for this to fail by accident. Nobody upstream cares where the file came from as long as the royalty report runs. That leaves one real loser in this story - the artist who would not put the music where someone could buy it.