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Get Yourself on the Radio – Amazing Tunes
Written by Andy Patterson
So, you’re a musician with some recordings and the next step is to try and get people to listen to them. One way is the traditional way of paying Radio Pluggers to send CDs of your work round to the major radio stations and hope that it does something..But there is another way, and I announce with a sense of pride in the fact that they are based in Gateshead in the old home of Century Radio – Amazing Radio. Amazing was on DAB until quite recently, but due to contractual difficulties, they are only available on the net right now.
How’s it Work?
Well, you create an account online at http://www.amazingtunes.com , and you upload your music. Easy as that. All music that is uploaded is considered for Radio Play, so you’ve already done most of the work you need to do. They listen to everything at the label and decide which they want to play on air.
But hang on – I’ve heard that they are the bad guys because they don’t pay PPL like the other radio stations.
Commercial radio stations pay a percentage of their commercial income to the PPL. Amazing doesn’t play adverts and never has, so once it has paid its radio station licence fee, that is it. You can however make money through their online store, by selling your music through them..
They sell the music they play?
Yes – once you upload a song, you can choose to either offer full length streaming for free, or make the track available for purchase on http://www.amazingtunes.com
Ah, so they’ll keep a commission on that?
100% of the proceeds go straight to the artist/label – through a Paypal transaction. Paypal do charge their standard transaction fees, but you can reduce this by signing up for their micro-payments scheme – and Amazing detail how to do this on the site.
It all sounds a bit suspicious…so how do Amazing make any money at all – with no advert or sales commissions?
They provide in-store music for retailers (and pay royalties for this. For this you need to have not registered with the PPL. If you are PPL registered, you are still able to upload your music to amazingtunes.com and for it to be considered for radio. If you are not PPL registered, then going down the instore route can provide much needed income.
Verdict
We’ll be uploading both Tati’s tunes and Chris’s single 18 Years to the site to see if we can get them on-air. We’ll update this blog post with details of any successes or otherwise once we have some feedback! Some bands have gone onto big things since being on Amazing – so we hope we can emulate their success.. If you have any experience with the station or the sites, then please comment below. Share the love for the community and all that. Cheers all.