What new albums are getting lots of spins at CJSW? Our weekly and monthly charts have the answers!

You can find our monthly Top 30 charts in The Scene, the Community Signal and our weekly newsletter. Our weekly Top 30 and Speciality Genre charts are reported to !earshot and the NACC and posted on our Instagram, Twitter and Facebook page! We also send charts and new music adds out in our weekly newsletter that you can sign up for here.

CJSW’s Easy Guide To Charts:
Who, What, When, Where, Why, How?

Why should you care about our charts, or national charts? Well, for starters it feels real good to see your album on a radio station Top 30! In general, it means your album has gotten a few spins throughout the week, so your music has reached the ears of new listeners in new places. Woo hoo!

Since most, if not all, campus/community radio stations operate as ‘freeform’ radio, volunteer programmers are in control of what they play on their shows. New music submitted to stations is reviewed and if it’s a fit for the airwaves, it’ll likely be made available to their programmers. Stations like CJSW don’t adhere to a typical ‘rotation’ like more commercial stations, but if you develop positive relationships with music departments and programmers around the country, that’ll take you further than traditional ‘rotation’ will.

Beyond that, here are a few useful things you can use Charting for:

1. Grants!
If you’re looking to apply for a grant to record a new album, embark on a tour or new marketing campaign, or another musical project, having chart data can really add to your application. We recommend taking screenshots of any chart appearance and keeping them in a folder to pull from when writing a grant application.

2. Touring!
Knowing where your album is getting played often can be really informative when you set out to book a tour. If you noticed your album was charting at CILU in Thunder Bay, for example, you might want to consider adding that as a stop on your tour. You can reach out to those radio stations a head of time and see if there are any interview, performance, or promotional opportunities. If you’re a Calgary artist looking for contact information for other stations, get in touch! We can help.

3. Market Research!
If you’re not planning a tour but are looking at a new digital marketing campaign to promote a single, album release, or something else, you can again use charting info to help inform that.

Chart Reports

You can find chart information directly on station websites, as well as on earshot! and NACC. This is where you can grab screenshots and take note of your chart appearances. Read on for more about those.

earshot!
earshot! is Canada’s national campus and community radio report, headed up by the folks at the NCRA (National Campus and Community Radio Association.) There are a number of stations who regularly report, including CJSW. You can find Top 30’s as well as speciality genre Top 10’s. This is also where the National Charts live, and a hefty annual year-end roundup. If you’re looking for something specific, we recommend simply Googling
“artist name” earshot
Including quotation marks around artist name. This should bring up most chart appearances on earshot! You can also use the grey info button on the far right of an entry to look at all chart appearances for that album:

NACC
This is the North American College and Community Radio Chart, hence NACC. Its scope is much larger, and charts here generally feature artists that are more established, or represented by a label or large promotion agency. College and Community radio operates quite a bit differently in the U.S. than it does here, so even if your release is doing well on Canadian charts, it might not appear here. That being said, it could! We recommend doing the same Google search for NACC that’s in the above section.

If you’ve got any other questions about charts and tracking, you can get in touch with the Music Department at music[at]cjsw.com