RDR Music Director

Hello! If you’re reading this, then congratulations! You are Rainy Dawg Radio’s next music director. As the title suggests, your job is to “direct” the general “musical” vibe of the station, which means keeping a watchful eye over the Top 50 for DJs as well as our after-hours default playlist.

Below, you will find a helpful and complete guide to being Rainy Dawg Radio’s music director.

asuwrdmd@uw.edu. pass: BigDawg$tatus1

Spotify: asuwrdmd@uw.edu pass: Mac&cheese1

soundcloud: asuwrdmd@uw.edu pass: bigdawgstatus

Music Stuff: Make sure to listen to new releases as they come out, especially on Fridays. This is the main part of the job. You will figure out a schedule of listening and publishing this list that works best for you, but you should be sending out a list of albums newly added to the Music Rotation every week to the DJs. Some blogs to look at are Gorilla Vs. Bear, Bandcamp Weekly, Album Of The Year, Band In Seattle (check out their youtube channel for live performances), KEXP blog, Loud and Quiet, and looking at the NACC charts. You can also join “College Radio Collective” on facebook where you can talk to other college radio employees and see what they’re listening to. Promoters will send you a TON of albums —  don’t worry about listening to all of them. It’s impossible. Keep an eye on what they’re sending you, reply to the ones who are sending you the good stuff, but don’t worry about replying to everyone. In terms of publishing the list, I found that Monday morning worked well for me, giving me the weekend to do listening to the new albums. Maintain the list in a Google Doc that DJs can easily access (keep it pinned on the Facebook page and include a link to it out each week in the email), as well as the Spotify playlist on our Spotify. This Spotify playlist is both for DJs and the public. You also need to transfer the music files to the computer in the studio to play in between shows. Many albums can be found with a little searching, just typing in the artist into your email search will yield results and you can just download from there

If you wish to continue the Rainy Dawg Weekly playlist, send out submissions for that a few days in advance of when you want to publish it, then assemble the playlist on our official RDR Spotify account. Work with the promotions coordinator to figure out a time to post on Facebook and Instagram when it’s published!

Also, Rainy Dawg Radio reports our weekly plays to the North American College Chart (NACC). The NACC’s reporting opens up every Friday afternoon and closes every Tuesday morning, giving you plenty of time to report what you need to report. What you need to report: The current week’s Top 5 adds and Top 30 spins. The Top 5 adds are whatever albums you added to the Music Rotation that week. Please ensure that these albums are current. Some promotional companies will want you to add albums to NACC before they even see wide release, so keep this in mind. To access the list of albums that are being spun the most, log on to Spinitron, click on the “Music DB” dropdown menu, then click on “Search.” Under the “Search for” dropdown menu, click on “Disk spin statistics.” Check the “New” box so as to ensure that only the albums that DJs are checking as “New” (i.e., albums on the Music Rotation) are being conjured. Set the “Played” time frame to 1 week before the current date, and click “Search!” You need to work with the Assistant Manager to determine how to keep DJs accountable about playing new music, you’ll find that things like forgetting to press the “New” button when entering during a show makes things so much more annoying for you. Keep transparency in your work with the DJs, it’ll help you a lot and is important for volunteers to know what you’re up to!

Specialty Music Leads: Yes I know the name for this has changed a lot but I think that Specialty Music Leads is the most accurate as interns technically need to work 3 hours a week for that title. You can choose to use my outline for it or you can change the responsibilities. Information on this will be in my google drive folder. You can choose to work with an intern who can manage the leads but you must oversee it all as the director. Hiring is up to you and you have to coordinate that. You may also change the genre names to be more current as I just used the traditional names.

Miscellaneous: try to keep up on emails. You’ll get a ton from promoters, so keeping your inbox organized is crucial. Checking the mailbox in the SAO office on the second level is important so you’ll need to do it once a week. You will also need to contact the promoters to change your name in their system or else all emails/packages will be addressed to me or other past MDs.

ASUW things: You need to enter your office hours on hours.asuw.org. Click your name from the drop down menu and enter the times that you will be in the office in green. Please also log the weekly meeting in blue (choose “meeting”). Take 15 hours minus the hours of meetings you have that week and that sill be the amount of time you have to work on MD stuff. 75% of that time left must be in the office while the other 25% can be remote. To log remote hours, set a block under “meeting” but type “remote” in the comments. You should also check slack (asuwseattle.slack.com) to communicate with other ASUW entities. Utilize the search bar as well, as there’s many years of usage still available to look at and you’ll find a lot of useful information there. Check the ASUW employee portal on the ASUW website (link on bottom of page) and you’ll find a lot of the resources you need there.

Up to you! These should be determined both as a staff and individually at the beginning of every quarter. My personal goals included maintaining diverse programming whether for the music rotation, the types of shows we had on air or for on-campus events. I also tried to increase volunteer knowledge of staff operations and increase transparency to bridge the gap. Talking to volunteers and maintaining relationships is just a great way to stay involved in the RDR community in general, but is also important as a staff member to make sure that your work is aligned with what the community wants.

Event Planning: You will do a lot of collaboration with your co-workers and other entities about what artists to bring to campus. You should start brainstorming who you want to bring early in the year, and keep doing this as albums release. Pay attention to what albums are getting plays from DJs on Spinitron, as this will reflect what DJs are getting excited about. Make sure to talk to people not involved in RDR as well since events are for the campus as a whole, not just for RDR. I personally believe that events should be free and we have the funding to do so. Keep in mind that outdoor events cannot be ticketed. Venues that can be considered are the Ethnic Cultural Theatre (small, not very accessible, easy to set up, bad sound quality), Hub Lyceum (kinda awkward, accessible, often booked), Meany (we’ve had trouble in the past booking this place but you could try), Intellectual House (could be good for an acoustic performance as they don’t have sound equipment for a big performance), Paranasus (has worked in the past, worried about noise bc classrooms nearby, also could work for acoustic), Daily Newsroom (do this for live sessions since they have audio equipment and other collaborations with the daily), HUB Lawn (great venue, can only be in late spring). Regardless of where you go, START EARLY. One live show a quarter is a lot of work and doesn’t leave much time to work on general improvements at the station so consider doing two. Always do Bday fest though!

General event timeline: 

Fall/winter: local shows

Spring: Birthday Fest

Throughout: Live sessions

Live Sessions: Scheduling live sessions is easy. All it takes is personally reaching out to the artist and figuring out a time. The hard part comes in the logistics in the studio. One thing you must do is ask the surrounding offices for permission since it’s never going to be completely soundproof and the HUB has the ability to stop you if things get too loud. The Daily proved to be a good place to do live sessions so you may also want to work with them with this.

The general manager will set the meeting date/time of the weekly meeting. Try to schedule this for early in the week.

One annoying thing is that contacts may show up with past employee’s names. Deleting their contact on your email will hopefully refresh their name to the current one.

Another important contact is Trevor Whiton, RDR’s advisor, who can be reached at algernon@uw.edu, or you can get his cell number from him or the GM if you need it.

Make sure to check the mail every day for any CDs that come in the mail. There will be a lot of junk you won’t listen to, but there will also be some impressive gems, especially from Sub Pop, Hardly Art, and even some of the major labels.

Also, make sure to engage in discussions with DJs about which new albums from the Music Rotation (or which new albums in general) they are enjoying. The best part of this job is getting the opportunity to interview, counsel, and befriend the wonderful folks who make up our volunteering cast of DJs and bloggers, so keep that relationship alive.

This is something you discussed as being one of your main goals. Currently we don’t have a central database and location for all of our files and I think this would be a great thing to take on. Work with the technology manager to figure out a way to store the files. Also talk to him about new DJ software and automation software to use on air. Things like station call outs and advertisements can be automated with a software and I think it would be a great thing to invest your time in to legitimize our station. Check the “College Radio Collective” page on facebook for recommendations on softwares to use. I fully support this undertaking and think that sacrificing a live event to allow for time to work on this would be great.

Below is an incomplete list of awesome promoters who will be calling you, emailing you, and sending you downloads to some great new music that you should be considering for adds to the best of your ability:

Pirate!

Shine On

Co-Sign

Terrorbird

A man A plan A canal

I’ll tell you all about communication with these folks in our in-person meeting, but what you need to know now is that you will be receiving a LOT of solicitations from these folks. Both calls and emails. Essentially, you hold the power in these conversations. You don’t need to add anything they’re asking you to. More on that in our meeting.

NOTE: In order to access the downloads these folks send you, you will need a username and a password. Some of them will supply you the username and password in the email. Others, you will need to ask. They’ll be understanding, though, as the usernames and passwords change somewhat frequently and they can be lost in the transition.

For NACC, go to https://naccchart.com. The login email address is asuwrdmd@uw.edu. The password is the same as the password to log into that email address’ GMail account, which you can change once you know it. From there, follow the instructions in order to submit the Adds and Top 30 spins.

See “Weekly To-Dos.”

See “Weekly To-Dos.”

If any are missing, let me know.