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Submitting Music

Music can only be submitted by snail mail:

Address:
Music Director

WREK 91.1 FM

350 Ferst Drive NW, Suite 2224

Atlanta, GA 30332-0630

 

WREK can handle all common music media formats, but practically speaking, only CDs and LPs will get airplay from our station's ops (i.e. "DJs".) Cassettes and DATs and other formats may be submitted, but odds are they won't get played at much, if at all. Unless you hound the Music Directors, receipt of submissions will not be acknowledged. We receive roughly 100 submissions a week and we're all full-time students; it's tough enough for us to tread water, let alone provide value-added niceties such as personalized e-mails letting you know we got your disc. If you sent it to the above address, chances are we did get it.

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 Programming

The 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 Philosophy

Markus 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 Directors

Your 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

Does WREK play independently-produced music?

Absolutely! We've found that the quality of music is generally inversely proportional to the size of the organization releasing it plus the amount of money and effort spent marketing it.

How can I tell if my music was programmed?

You can regularly check the On-Line Add List Generator to see what's been added lately. Note that you can enter your label name in the optional field and it will report every record from you that we've ever programmed (the database goes back to the early 90's!). After checking the add list, you can also ask us via email at music.director@wrek.org

When can I hear my music?

Music is not scheduled for broadcast. All selections are done at random by the on-air op, depending on the format at the particular time.

  • By wrekadmin at 8 Aug 2006 - 7:22pm