This week, WordPlay T. Jay decided to do something a little different — test out an older music delivery platform to see if it’s worth it.
T. Jay hasn’t used Radio Airplay in about seven years, which was evident by the tracks that we still on his profile. Radio Airplay is a platform for independent musicians to promote their music through Jango, a free online music streaming service founded in 2007. In 2016, the service boasted 8 million active listeners and more than 30 million songs in its library.
T. Jay decided to give Radio Airplay a try, as it would give him new listeners that may like his music and decide to search for it on other platforms, as well.
The service works by purchasing credits, then using the credits to play songs of choice. Only full plays are counted against the credits, meaning a song must play from beginning to end.
Sign up is free, and there are a number of standard features. Paid packages increase things like plays, photo uploads, popscores, fan messaging tools, and more.
Songs must be uploaded as MP3, and Jango reports plays to Sound Exchange for royalties purposes. This is why T. Jay believes it is not considered to be payola.
“It does pay royalties, so I see it as more a promotion tool like Facebook for you to find a new audience and listeners you would not get elsewhere,” T. Jay said. “It’s because you’re getting paid royalties on the back end and getting exposure to new people that I would not consider it to be payola.”
Radio Airplay is a bit outdated in some regards, such as still offering a MySpace promotion link and forcing users to create custom promotion links for services like Spotify.
However, it does allow users to select artist targets to match their music to those whom they sound like to hopefully increase plays.
T. Jay opted for the Gold services, which is $30 and guarantees 600 monthly plays and 100 bonus plays. After one day, he had received about 20 total plays. There were no responses to his songs yet, and there was not any user data calculated over that short a period of time.
T. Jay aims to check back again after a few weeks and see what the results are. One thing he did like is the option to email, twice per day, all those who had listened to his songs, allowing him to promote his new album, “Overtime.”
“At the rate I paid, $30 for 700 plays, that’s about 4 cents per play, which I feel is pretty decent,” T. Jay said. “As of right now, I would recommend Radio Airplay. And, people with TuneCore get an extra 100 plays for signing up.”
For more about Radio Airplay, check out the full video below.