How does WUVT have so much music? Where do we get it from? Is there a general genre we have, or do we play everything?

"The main way we get music is through promoters. These promoters are companies that represent artists or labels and advertise their music to us. Some labels are their own promoters like 4AD, Secretly, and Sub Pop. Others will kind of do their own promotion but mostly just go through a specific promoter, like Merge and Mute use one called Terrorbird, but I have loose contact with the label themselves. Every week, the promoters send me an email containing all the new adds and I go through and select the stuff that’s good. We try to get mostly physicals, but that’s become a little harder with an almost unanimous shift to digital music. Outside of promoters, some of the music is stuff artists just sent us! This tends to in general be more local-ish bands who have heard of us or come through the milk parlor. In short, the way we have so much music is just through years of getting stuff in one of these two ways. We are a “play everything” kind of station (not official term), which means we’re not restricted to a certain genre."

What's the deal with new music? Why does WUVT have so many new music shows? How do we get new music?

"In exchange for promoters, artists, and labels giving us stuff, they want us to chart our Top 30 on the NACC radio chart every week. This is basically just a list of Top music, including Top Adds, Top 200, Top Heavy etc. etc. To determine what charts where, it’s important to see what is getting played at our station! That’s where new music shows come in. When DJ’s mark something as new music, it gets logged and I get sent an email with all of that in a list to chart. I talked about how we get new music logistically above, but charting is a big part of how we say that we are station that plays new music."

What does music director do? Has someone from music staff really listened to all of that music in the stacks!

"I’m responsible for quality control, charting, promoter coordination, and managing music staff. When something comes in, either because it got sent or because I asked for it, I make sure it’s not objectively bad. I try to be pretty lenient, but there is stuff that is just not produced well from a technical standpoint that is pretty much an automatic no. I then send the good stuff to my music staff, and someone reviews it! So at some point, someone has listened to the stuff in the stacks. Then at the end of the week I chart everything like I spoke about earlier."

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