We met with industry veteran Rachel Strassberger (Head of Strassberger music consultancy) in Barcelona, Spain. Strassberger is a music management company that works with the world’s biggest artists, labels and event companies to create unique, tailored worldwide campaigns. Here’s an insight into how she uses WARM and her radio-related work.
Our consultancy works with major labels, independent labels and self-releasing artists, by doing playlisting, radio promotion, media placement, PR, etc. We monitor both radio airplay, streaming playlists and press coverage. We basically monitor everything and bring it back to the artists and their teams.
If there is a radio station organically playing your music in South Africa, we can go back to the record label and say: “Hey, the artist is getting played 10 times a day on this radio, you should now pick it up and go to promoters and other media to maximise those results”. If we did not detect that, probably nobody would. We wouldn't be able to provide this kind of service if it wasn't for WARM radio-tracking platform.
Though streaming has had a lot of hype, radio is still really important. Even though radios have been slightly put aside in the past few years, they’re fundamental in plenty of countries. It's always a great hand to have. When I go to my clients (a manager or a label), and say “we got this many radio plays in XYZ country or on XYZ station”, I find that they will value this information more than streaming data. Radio data covers a lot of ground - for example, it makes the manager aware of more derived income revenue (publishing and neighbouring rights).
Also, thanks to radio support (and usually subsequently Shazam data from that airplay), a manager can better sell their artist to local promoters for live-performances. After working with WARM we can really see that it's a domino effect - radio is still extremely powerful and will continue to be so, and that is how we sell our services.
We are doing some radio promotion and we reach out to radio stations. Our services are not specific to a certain country, we work worldwide.
There are a lot of ways to approach this. For example, before we start working on a campaign, we track other artists who had a bigger success in the same territory, and see where they were played. Then we reach out to the radios and say: “Hey, you are playing this artist A - would you be interested in artist B?” Another strategy is to see where past tracks of the artist are performing well/trending organically (which we can see thanks to WARM), and focus our pitches to that territory to build momentum there.
Radio stations are usually really happy to get acknowledged. We approach them with gratefulness and pay attention to everything including the niches and previous work. However, it's crucial that we reach out for the right reasons, not only because their scope is the mass audience. We make everything personalised!
