I'll try to break this down for you guys because I think that this thread is really touching on a much bigger subject that is increasingly becoming the 'way it is' in hip-hop. If you ever travel around you will notice that certain songs that get played in Cleveland, for example, have never and probably will never be played in LA. There's a really easy answer for all of this and I'll try to break down how it works:
There are 2 groups of rappers who have songs on the radio. The first is the group of Newer Artist/Indie Artist/Artist No Longer Receiving Label Support. The second is the Hot At The Moment Artists/Very Commercially Buzzworthy Acts/Established Extremely Popular Acts/Label Desperately Wants This Person To Get Big Artists.
The approach for the two groups is very different and that is why you hear certain things in certain areas and why you hear certain things in ALL areas.
Group 1 Rapper: Put's together a radio budget. Be that with street money, record deal advance, private investor, etc. Pretty much any way they can get money that doesn't include the radio actually tapping into their budget, because a radio budget will never be approved for this person. Someone like Q, weird as it sounds, falls into this group. Interscope really just humors him because of Kendrick, and this last album, the build up, the promo, was all done by TDE. Interscope helped out very minimally and didn't believe in the project, so they took their hands off the wheels with a majority of the radio initiative.
But let's take a more generic, less 'connected' rapper. Let's call this rapper, ABCD, and he is from some midwestern city with not a big scene, lets say Omaha Nebraska. In and around Omaha he is relatively known he has been making a little bit of noise. He can't get any reasonable shot at a deal because he isn't doing enough in any metric that matters for a label to want to give him more than a bullshyt 50k advance and a shyt budget to use to promote/record. His first step to getting known and getting a metric that matters is, was, and as of now will always be the radio. Your BDS count is still important, and always has been. It's a quantifiable way to see who is actually making an impact and who isn't.
ABCD has some industry connections, nobody all that important or popular, but he has enough people in his corner to get to this point: Hiring a radio promoter. The radio promoter is basically someone who usually works/has worked at one of the Big 4's radio departments and knows all the PD's and important DJ's of consequence across the country, or at the very least can get in touch with any of them within 1 phone call. This person will ABCD: "What's your goal?". ABCD will say to be able to get a song big enough to get his show quote up, be able to tour off it, and eventually sign a deal for a large advance and to have some leverage at the label so he doesn't get shelved.
Second question from Radio Promoter: "What's your budget?" Now, this is the tricky part. Basically he is asking you, do you want to have a record going in New York, or do you want to have a record going in St. Louis. The budget you dictate to your radio promoter will dictate where you get your spins. In the past it was all about getting your BDS up in NY and LA, that's all that mattered. When Atlanta came on the scene, and Miami, everything kind of changed and we now see the shift in that with the radio. Now instead of spending 250k-500k to try to get a song in rotation in NY, you can spend 100k in a region that isn't as big (in terms of market share) as NY, and essentially get the same thing out of the equation.
So ABCD says, I have 100k to spend on radio. Radio Promoter will then tell him, he suggests that they throw all that money into a regional campaign involving, Omaha/Nebraska, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, and North Texas. For that amount of money in those markets, ABCD can be assured that he will have a top 10 song on whatever the daily countdown is for a period of time. He will get played during peak hours for a negotiated amount of time, and will essentially be in rotation. ABCD will also travel to all the markets, meet the DJ's, do interviews, and begin the process of presenting himself as more than just a rapper with a one off song he spent a lot of money on. This will give the illusion, to listeners, that this is now a song and an artist of consequence. If the song connects on a broader level, the Radio Promoter can then make calls to the other neighboring areas in the region and start the process of taking the song national, hopefully with little to no more money. This is the point where a label will come calling.
Now, the obvious question is, what is that 100k used for? From my experiences, it seems that the radio promoter takes about 15-20 percent for their own time and energy. The rest he uses to negotiate with DJ's and PD's. The more plays you want in a given time by a given station, the more it's going to cost you. The more bells and whistles you want around your song, it's going to cost you. So the Radio Promoter put's together a package where he guarantees X amount of spins in each market for Y amount of time and presents this to ABCD. ABCD agrees, and this is how you have some songs that you only hear in certain places.
Group 2 Rapper: This is a person who is an in demand commodity, so the label will do all the work for you. For the label though, they can't just be handing DJ's brown bags of money like that anymore. The game has changed. So the payola is masked. The label will commission the DJ to MC/Host a show and pay him too much for the appearance. The label will promise the artist will do some sort of favor for the DJ (exclusive interview, appearance on the DJ's mixtape, In studio performance, etc). You get the idea.
Songs from Group 2 Rappers, say Wayne for example, that remain in rotation for long stretches of time, way after people have grown tired of the song, way after the sales of the song have slipped, are really just favors from the radio stations to the artist and/or the label as a show of good faith. The artist name still means something in the climate, and the label name means even more.
You guys have to keep in mind, that there are only 4 labels. And of those 4 labels, Universal has a more than 65% market share the last time I had looked it up. The radio stations, that actually play music, have no choice but to cater to the artists on the majors, no matter how bad the song is, no matter how much people don't want to hear it.
This is the problem with the system, and why it will always be broken. Too much is done for favors, money, and other variables. Not a single song on the radio during any sort of time of the day that matters is ever ever ever played because of the merit of the song. It is bought and paid for somehow, someway, somewhere along the line. This is why I have given up the radio long ago, and refuse to listen to anything but my iPod.
