Music Programming at WREKTable of Contents
Submitting MusicMusic can only be submitted by snail mail:
Now, if the music you send to us is programmed, and we have an email address on file for you, odds are you'll get an email confirming that from our automated weekly email system. How Music is Selected for ProgrammingThe Music Director pulls CDs and LPs randomly from our bin of submissions. We don't have "Loud Rock" MDs or "RPM" MDs, etc., so there's no need to address any submission to a specific individual unless you've made arrangements with that person to review your album ahead of time. Because items are pulled randomly, it sometimes means newer submissions get reviewed before older ones. This isn't really ideal or fair, but until we find a way to streamline the operation, that's how it's going to be for the forseeable future.Once a submission has been pulled from our inbox, it often takes a long time to decide what to do with it. We're not trying to be difficult; this is just a warning that it's a fact of life here at WREK. Again, we're all full-time students - many with part-time jobs - and while we love working here, it pays well below minimum wage and most of us aren't using it for resume fodder, so the music programming job must be placed a little further down our list of personal priorities than we'd like. There's nothing wrong with hounding us about tracking down your release, however. We often need prodding. Programming PhilosophyMarkus DeShon, a former Program Director wrote a nice essay titled "Why WREK is WREK" back in 1995 that outlined our programming philosophy back then and has held up pretty doggone well over the last decade. Before deciding to send us your release, you should take a moment to read it to get a feel for why we program what we do.Taking a look at our On-Line Add List Generator will give you an up-to-date look at the sorts of things we're programming these days. After doing these two things, you may want to ask yourself if WREK will program what you send before you mail it off. Adhering to the philosophy that Markus was able to capture so well on paper gives us a yield of around 20% of the submissions we receive. We don't have any target quotas (it would be swell if we could program everything we receive,) that's just the general historical average of what percentage gets programmed from what we receive. As turn-of-the-century robber baron J. Pierpont Morgan once famously quipped when a peer who was interested in buying a yacht like Morgan's inquired about the expenses of maintaining the boat, "If you have to ask how much it costs to own a yacht, you probably can't afford one." If you have to ask whether WREK will play your release or not, there's a better than fair chance it won't get played. You probably haven't familiarized yourself enough with our programming and that you'll fall into the 80% of those who don't get their releases into our rotation. Contacting the Music DirectorsYour best bet for contacting us is e-mail. Our address is music.director@wrek.org. The phone number is 404.894.2468 and the fax number is 404.894.6872. We usually don't keep regular hours and faxes frequently don't end up in the right hands, so e-mail is definitely the way to go.Q & A
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