We can sign up for mentoring sessions at NERFA, with folks who have offered to provide mentoring on specific topics. I signed up for a first one with John Platt, DJ on WFUV, about getting your music on radio. The timing is right for this topic – I need to decide how I’m going to get my music submitted to the relevant radio stations. And this time around I was smart enough to give it a copyright date of 2011, so I’m not fighting against already being outdated. John is great, and it was a useful conversation. The first decision is whether to send it out myself, or hire someone to do it. And, honestly, at this point time is a scarcer commodity than money in my life, so that argues in favor of hiring someone (although the KYST folks made a good case for the usefulness of doing it yourself because it gives you full control of the relevant information). The next step, if I am going to hire someone, is who the right person would be. And John was helpful there. I talked to him about the two people who do this who I know about and he gave me some feedback on them – their strengths and weaknesses and types of things they focus on. Which gave me a sense of which of the two of them I would be more likely to use. But he suggested a third person, someone who, based on what he knows of my music (including having heard some of a showcase I did last night) that he thought would be especially good for my region and the type of singer-songwriter-y stuff I do. And then he told her about me, and she and I played phone and email tag today, and then eventually he pointed her out for me as I was passing through the lobby. We had a chat, I gave her a CD, and we’re going to get back in touch. It’s tricky – she’s orders of magnitude more expensive than the other person I was considering (who also hasn’t yet heard my new CD, so that’s another necessary step). It’s true that we don’t yet know if she’ll even want to work with my CD – it’s a necessary first step that the person promoting your music to radio genuinely believe it in. But I also need to think about what I should be aiming for in radio, which is a pretty existential consideration. Stay tuned.