How to contact SomaFM
If you have a general station question, or want to know about your order status, please contact us by email at dj@somafm.com.
If you have a question about an artist or song we play, or anything related to programming on a particular channel, please contact the music director for that channel directly:
- Groove Salad, Lush, Drone Zone, Secret Agent, Illinois Street Lounge, cliqhop, Space Station Soma, Digitalis, Mission Control, Suburbs of Goa, Black Rock FM: rusty@somafm.com
- BAGeL Radio / 480 Minutes: ted@somafm.com
- Beat Blender: shawn@somafm.com
- Boot Liquor: roy@somafm.com
- Covers: mkoper@somafm.com
- Doomed: lucretia@somafm.com
- Folk Forward: sean@somafm.com
- Indie Pop Rocks! elise@somafm.com
- Sonic Universe: nitya@somafm.com
- The Trip:
Please, please, please do not put our email addresses on mailing lists.
And please do not ask us to send you a copy of a song. We are licensed only to broadcast, not to distribute music. We are also unable to provide downloads of our shows or mixes due to copyright restrictions.
Due to the high volume of email we get we can't promise we'll reply to everyone, but we will read all your email (unless it mistakenly gets blocked by our spam filter... we get about 350 spams a day now, and sometimes a few legitimate messages can get caught by the spam filter).
We are much better at answering email than phone calls, but if you must call the studio phone is
How to have your tracks considered for Airplay
If you think your music would fit nicely on one or more of our channels, please send it to us. SomaFM supports unsigned and independent artists, and we want to help great music get heard.
Electronic (Digital) Submissions
We prefer digital submissions.
To submit Electronic (Digital) tracks, please use Dropbox. If you don't have an account already, You can get a Dropbox Account for free. Just share a folder of your music with somafm@somafm.com. Make sure your MP3 files are high bitrate (256kb or "v0"/Highest Quality VBR). No WAV files please; no m4a files. Check your Metadata! Make sure your artist name and track names are correct. Include the album name where available, otherwise leave blank. Put your website and email address in the comments field. Use the "Grouping" ID field to put the name of the channel you think will best fit. Set the Genre to be something that best describes your music.
Please submit a single folder; named with your band name and the name of one channel you think it fits best on (e.g. My Band - Space Station Soma). We may put your music on any of our channels that we feel it fits, this just helps us know what basic genre of the music is and to make sure the proper music director receives it.) It never hurts to include a text file with a little info about yourself and where people can buy or download your music.
IMPORTANT: 128k MP3s and files from MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, etc., are not acceptable for broadcast and will not be considered.
Submissions to BAGeL Radio / 480 Minutes
For BAGeL Radio, please email ted@somafm.com a download link to a ZIP file containing high quality digital files of the release for airplay consideration. The ZIP files for BAGeL Radio can be hosted at YouSendIt, DropBox, WeTransfer, or several other similar free services. Please make sure that the files are 320kbps AAC or MP3 and contain complete metadata (artist, album, song, artwork, track numbers). Also, notation of the "radio focus tracks" is most helpful in letting us get off on the right foot with the record, and always appreciated.
Physical CD submissions
While we prefer digital submissions, we accept commercially-released CDs only. This means a mass-replicated CD that is available for purchase (or free distribution). If your CD does not meet this requirement, please submit it electronically (see above). CD-Rs and "one offs" are very hard for us to organize and import into our music library.
Our mailing address is:
SomaFM
2180 Bryant Street, Suite 208
San Francisco, CA 94110 US
Attn: (Channel name you are submitting to, e.g. Groove Salad, Indie Pop Rocks, etc.)
If you are submitting music for multiple channels, just send a single CD to the most likely channel, we'll make sure the other music directors get it as well. We may not play the music on the channel you submit it to if we think it will fit better on another channel. Do not send CDs via certified or registered mail or any other service that requires a signature as they will most likely be returned to you.
Include a little info about yourself, where people can buy or download the music, and which channel(s) you think your tunes would fit on. (hint: a post-it note on the CD suggesting the best tracks and the appropriate channel is a great idea!)
And one important thing: make sure your CD is in the Gracenote CDDB. The easiest way to do this is to use iTunes and load your CD in and enter all the track and album data, and use the menu command to "submit CD info". Detailed instructions are available from Gracenote. This ensures that when we load your CD into our systems, the correct artist and song track info gets loaded as well. And we're more likely to listen to your music if we've already loaded it into our database system. Remember, the more complete and accurate your metadata, the easier it will be for you to collect royalties due from SoundExchange.
Obviously, not all submissions will get air play - we're very picky about what our music! But we will try to listen to everything we get. Sometimes the various music directors get backlogged, so allow us some time to check out your music.
Thanks!
Rusty Hodge, General Manager and Program Director
Elise Nordling, Music Director, Indie Pop Rocks!
Ted Leibowitz, Music Director, BAGeL Radio / 480 Minutes
Nitya, Music Director, Sonic Universe
Shawn Blosser, Music Director, Beat Blender
Milkman, Music Director, The Trip
DJ Lucretia, Music Director, Doomed
Roy Batchelor, Music Director, Boot Liquor
