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Public specification · Radio & mixes side

The AAA
Pitch Standard

Version 1.0 · The radio and mixes view · Citable by number

This is the specification for what a competent music pitch contains, filtered to one side: presenters, producers, specialist shows, station music teams. Three sections — §04, §05 and §06 — differ depending on who receives the pitch, and only the radio and mixes clauses are shown here. Everything else is universal and applies wherever you send.

It is free, public, and free to reproduce. Nobody has to subscribe to anything to use it. The full document carries all four sides together.

Why a numbered standard, and not another guide

People who receive pitches don't explain rejections, because explaining costs time they don't have. Two hundred arrive, three get taken, and the rest get silence — not out of cruelty, but because writing "your subject line told me nothing" to a stranger takes ninety seconds and there are a hundred and ninety-seven of them.

So the sender learns nothing, sends the same pitch again next month, and the inbox gets worse for everyone.

A numbered standard makes a rejection citable. "Declined — §3.3" takes three seconds and tells the sender more than silence ever did. That is the entire purpose of this document. Everything else follows from it.

§ 01IdentificationAll sides

A recipient must be able to tell, in one glance, who is writing and on whose behalf.
  1. 1.1The pitch states who is sending it and on whose behalf. If you represent the artist, say so. If you are the artist, say that.
  2. 1.2It is sent from an address a reply actually reaches — not a no-reply, not an alias nobody monitors.
  3. 1.3One named recipient. Not a group address, not a visible CC list, not a BCC blast dressed up as a personal email.
  4. 1.4The recipient's name is correct, and so is the outlet's, show's, agency's or production's. A merge-field error voids the pitch.

§ 02The subject lineAll sides

The subject line is not a label. It is the only part of the pitch most recipients will ever read.
  1. 2.1It states the angle, not the artefact. "Artist name — EP title" describes a file. It does not describe a reason to open it.
  2. 2.2It carries a type marker so it can be filtered. Press: [News] [Premiere] [Interview] [Feature] [Comment] [Review] · Sync: [Sync] [Brief response] [Catalog] · Radio: [Radio] [Mix] [Exclusive] [Session] · Booking: [Booking] [Availability] [Live]
  3. 2.3It is specific enough that the recipient could find it by search three weeks later.
  4. 2.4No block capitals, no fabricated "Re:", no "Following up" on a first contact, no urgency that isn't real.

§ 03The first forty wordsAll sides

Assume the recipient stops reading at word forty, because most of them do.
  1. 3.1They establish three things: what is being offered, why this recipient, and why now.
  2. 3.2They do not open with a biography, a list of previous coverage, or a streaming figure.
  3. 3.3The pitch fails if its opening sentence would be equally true of two hundred other releases this month.
  4. 3.4"Why this recipient" means something specific they have published, played, placed or booked. Naming them is not the same as knowing them.

§ 04The relevance testRadio and mixes — Provisional

Most pitches fail here, and no amount of formatting rescues one that does. The universal rule is the same everywhere; the question being answered is not.
  1. 4.1A pitch must answer the question the recipient is actually asking — not the one the artist's team wishes they were asking.
  2. 4.2A release is not, by itself, a reason for anybody to act. Existing is not news, is not a sync, is not a booking.
  3. 4.3A pitch that fails its side's test below is not ready to send, however well written it is.
SideThe question you are actually answering
Radio & mixes ProvisionalIs it playable on this show, is it new to their audience, and is what's being offered genuinely theirs first?
The universal versionStrip out the artist's name and the release. Is there still a reason for this specific person to act? If not, there is no pitch yet — there is only a date.

§ 05AssetsRadio and mixes — Provisional

Every reply a recipient has to send asking for something is a reason to choose somebody easier.
  1. 5.1Linked, never attached. No attachment over 2 MB under any circumstances.
  2. 5.2One link. No login wall, no account required, no expiry inside ninety days.
  3. 5.3Files are named for the artist and the asset. Not IMG_4021.jpg. Credits travel with the file.
  4. 5.4Anything factual in the pitch — a date, a credit, a claim, a clearance — is verifiable from the link without asking you.
  5. 5.5The link contains the universal minimum below, plus everything listed for the side you are pitching.
SideWhat must be behind the link
All sidesArtist name as it should be written, release or availability date, full credits, one contact who can answer questions, and a private stream
Radio & mixes ProvisionalBroadcast-ready audio at the station's stated specification, a clean edit where the lyric requires one, stated duration, and for a mix a full tracklist with correct artist and label spellings
The testCould the recipient act on this — publish, place, play or book — without emailing you back for a single thing? If not, the pitch is incomplete, regardless of how good it is.

§ 06TimingRadio and mixes — Provisional

These are minimum lead times, not targets. A great pitch that arrives late is a late pitch.
  1. 6.1The relevant date — release, availability, or on-sale — and the embargo status appear in the first forty words or immediately beneath them.
  2. 6.2A pitch sent inside the minimum lead time says so, and says why, rather than hoping nobody notices.
Side and typeMinimum lead time
Radio — specialist show play Provisional3 weeks before release date
Radio — exclusive or first play Provisional4 weeks, and offered to one show at a time (§07)
Radio — guest mix or session Provisional6 weeks, longer if the show is pre-recorded

§ 07Exclusivity and embargoAll sides

Both words are routinely used to mean things they do not mean. Misusing them is the fastest way to lose a side permanently.
  1. 7.1An exclusive is offered to one recipient at a time. Offering the same "exclusive" to twelve is not a strategy, it is a lie that takes one message between them to expose.
  2. 7.2Every offer of exclusivity carries a stated reply-by date, so the recipient knows how long they are holding it.
  3. 7.3If it has been offered elsewhere and declined or lapsed, say so when you offer it next.
  4. 7.4An embargo is a request, not an instruction. It is not in force until the recipient has agreed to it.
  5. 7.5An embargo has a date and a time zone.
  6. 7.6"First play", "first look" and "premiere" are exclusives and are governed by every clause above.

§ 08Follow-upAll sides

The clause most often broken, and the one recipients care most about.
  1. 8.1Once. Not twice, not weekly, not "just floating this back to the top."
  2. 8.2After five working days at the earliest, in the original thread, so the recipient has the context.
  3. 8.3It adds something — a new asset, a confirmed date, a development. A follow-up that adds nothing is a second copy of a pitch already declined.
  4. 8.4Not by phone, social message, or in person at an event, unless you were invited to.
  5. 8.5Silence is a no. A sender who has met this standard is entitled to treat non-reply as a decline, close the loop, and move on without resentment.

§ 09ProhibitedAll sides

A pitch breaching any clause in this section does not meet the standard, whatever else it gets right.
  1. 9.1Contact details obtained from a purchased, scraped, or resold list.
  2. 9.2Undisclosed tracking pixels or read receipts.
  3. 9.3Any payment, gift, or consideration offered in exchange for coverage, placement, play or a booking, in any form, however it is described. Where the recipient is a licensed broadcaster this is not only against this standard — it is regulated, and it is their license at risk, not yours.
  4. 9.4Sending to a personal address that was not published for professional contact.
  5. 9.5Re-sending a declined pitch to the same person under a new subject line.
  6. 9.6Naming an outlet, show, brand or venue as interested, or a person as attached, without their agreement.
  7. 9.7Offering rights you do not control, or describing a track as cleared when the clearance has not been confirmed in writing.
  8. 9.8Offering anything you have not already secured. Guest list, tickets, a set time, an interview, a studio visit, a premiere, availability, a hold, an exclusive. An offer in a pitch is a commitment from the moment it is read, and the recipient will plan around it. If it is not agreed with whoever controls it, it is not yours to offer.
  9. 9.9Withdrawing an offer after it has been acted on. Where an offer helped secure the coverage, the play or the booking, failing to honor it is the most expensive breach in this document — and being slow, vague or unreachable about it counts as failing to honor it. If something genuinely falls through, say so immediately, in one sentence, without being chased.
The testEverything you offered — could you deliver all of it, today, if every recipient said yes at once? If not, you are not pitching, you are gambling with somebody else's page. An offer costs nothing to make and everything to break.

§ 10Declaring complianceAll sides

Optional. Some recipients ask for it; most won't.
  1. 10.1A sender may add one line to the foot of a pitch: Sent to the AAA Pitch Standard v1.0 — aaabrief.com/standard
  2. 10.2Declaring compliance falsely is worse than not declaring it. It is checkable, and it will be checked.

For anyone who receives pitches — how to use this

Link it wherever you tell people how to reach you. Submission guidelines, a show's contact page, an agency's site, the line in your bio. "Pitches should meet the AAA Pitch Standard" replaces a page of rules you'd otherwise write and maintain yourself.

Then decline with a citation. Three characters instead of a paragraph, and the sender learns something instead of nothing:

Not for us — §3.3
Can't use this — §5.5, and the lead time is short (§6)

You are not obliged to explain further, and nobody using this standard should expect you to. The point is that a citation costs you seconds and saves you the same pitch arriving again next month.

If your side's clauses are wrong, tell us and we'll change them. They are drafts until somebody who does your job has signed them off. That is the whole invitation.

Nothing here asks you for anything else. AAA does not publish your contact details, does not sell access to you, and does not need you to subscribe to anything.

If a clause below is wrong — that's the point

Every number below is an outsider's guess. Lead times for specialist play, first play and guest mixes, and what a delivery actually needs to be usable — all of it should be corrected by someone who runs a show.

The radio and mixes clauses are marked "Provisional." They stay that way until somebody who works this side has read them and signed off. Corrections go straight in, and the signatory is credited. Tell us what we got wrong.

Proposals from people who work this side take precedence over everyone else's, including ours.

Radio & mixes side — signatories

A side is only ratified once somebody who works it has signed its clauses. The core — §01–03 and §07–10 — is signed by Sara Cooper and Lesley Wright.

Nobody yet
The first person working this side to tell us what we got wrong becomes its signatory. That could be you.

License. Reproduce this in full, unmodified, with attribution to Access All Areas and a link to aaabrief.com/standard. Quote from it freely. Do not publish a modified version under this name — a standard that means different things in different places is not a standard.

What this is not. It defines what a compliant pitch contains. It does not teach you how to find the story, write the bio, or build the campaign that gets you there. That's a craft, and it's what The Pitch System and the monthly brief are for.

This page is generated from the full standard and is never edited by hand, so the radio and mixes clauses here are always identical to the radio and mixes clauses there.

Version 1.0 — published 2026. Access All Areas, an imprint of Sara Cooper, trading as AAABrief. Angels Camp, California.