Tools: WARM

Monitoring 28,000 stations worldwide, WARM (or World Airplay Radio Monitor) claims to provide the biggest coverage of any radio tracking service. Jesper Skibsby founded the company in 2017, when he discovered that incumbents were charging hundreds of euros to track one song worldwide – and aimed to offer more accessible pricing. WARM, he says, aims to “give true transparency to artists/bands, record labels, PR agencies, and booking agents.”

Skibsby was an artist manager when he realised the market needed another solution. ANd that market is quite broad: he says that, “a little under 50% of our users are artists; managers represent 10%; and 10% are producers and songwriters. But even radio promoters are very interested, as usually they get paid for their services and then it’s hard to prove to an artist they have actually been played on radio.”

From the artist, manager, and label point of view, being able to track airplay is beneficial for several reasons, and not just because of increased control of their airplay royalty collections. Airplay data allows for optimisation of marketing strategies – for instance: by tracking similar artists, stations that might be relevant for their music can be discovered, focusing radio promotion strategy, and if a song is seeing increased attention via airplay, they can enhance awareness in this market with digital advertising.

WARM tracks 28,000+ stations: this includes major radio stations, college radio stations, and smaller web radio stations. If it’s not already being tracked, users can request a station to be monitored. WARM’s backend offers an easily-searchable database of stations, which can be filtered by continent, country or city – a great tool for research into local radio.

WARM’s tracking works on a song basis, rather than an artist basis. This is reflected in the company’s song-by-song pricing – although users can track a number of songs by one artist and see analytics across them all at once. On the platform, users can search for existing songs via song name, artist, album, or ISRC; or they can simply upload their own, making this platform useful for all types of artists.

The platform’s interface offers control and insight: under the ‘Plays’ tab, users choose a song or artist to track, specify a timeframe, and can see where and how much the music is played. The default view shows all continents, countries, cities, channels and song versions. This helps users find a global heatmap, and offers topline stats – such as number of worldwide spins and a song’s top three continents. Searches can be fine-tuned by filtering specific countries, cities, etc., and by hovering over a specific location, the number of plays in the chosen timeframe are shown.

The ‘Analytics’ tab goes a little deeper., with a graph showing the song’s trajectory on radio and insights into play distribution across continents. As you change the filters, these insights will change: a country-level graph shows total plays, the cities the song has received airplay in, the song’s Top 50 cities for radio play, plus the number of plays per city. At city level, it will show you the Top Channels and how many times each channel played the song.

Reports can be downloaded, which is useful for all sorts of practical reasons, and helps create income opportunities, Skibsby explains: “Reports give you an overview of your neighbouring rights. With this data you have the proof about how much a song is played, how much an artist and their catalogue are worth outside of streaming and recorded music sales.”

WARM also offers some useful features to supercharge your promotion strategy by getting to know local stations and tastes. Tracking a successful song by a new independent artist in the same scene as your own can show where it was played first and on which stations – revealing suitable, possibly previously unknown, tastemakers for you to pitch to, pre-release. WARM’s radio charts also provide an overview of which music is currently doing well on radio stations across different markets.

An interesting – and useful – feature is WARM’s small but integrated database of radio pluggers, complete with information on genres they specialise in, territories they cover, pricing, and contact information. There’s also a database of radio stations with general submission contact information.

There are a few competitors also offering radio tracking like Soundcharts, Spot on Track or Chartmetric, but WARM is the only platform dedicated to radio tracking. This is reflected in coverage: Spot on Track’s pricing is more accessible than WARM’s, but only covers 6,000 stations; while Soundcharts covers 1,800, and Chartmetric 1,000 – compared to WARM’s 28,000 stations.

Tracking a song for one month costs €7, and this price is reduced the longer a user tracks a song. You can also choose to track a song for 3 months (€19) or 12 months (€49). In the latter case, users can change the song they’d like to track on a monthly basis – useful for small, ongoing release campaigns. Pricing is also bundled in 5 or 10 song increments – which reduces the price to as little as €2.50 per song, per month.

WARM is offering Music Ally readers a 20% discount on all single song subscriptions – use the code “musically20” to receive the discount.