Producing Radio Commercials vs. Producing Music

If you’re listening to the radio, chances are good that you’re either hearing a commercial or music. Although one is different from the other, they do have their similarities.

Radio commercials tend to fall into 60, 30, 15 or even 10 second segments. Quite a far cry from the average three or four minute song you hear on the radio. Now with music, you typically have fifteen seconds to catch someone’s attention before they lose interest and change the station. However, if you use that approach to a thirty second radio ad, half the ad is already gone. Music isn’t produced with any time constrictions in mind like radio commercials are. It’s much more focused on producing the sound the artist wants in their song rather than making sure that the song fits a certain time frame.

The composition and construction of a radio ad and music are also very different as well. A radio ad typically consists of a voice over, a music bed and appropriate sound effects. This results in anywhere from 6 to 16 tracks in a ProTools session depending on the amount of sound effects used. The composition of a song depends entirely on what kind of music it is, but just as an example, a music producer will often use at least 10 or 12 tracks for an average drum kit alone. Of course, if you’re working with a hard rock drummer such as Neil Pert of Danny Carey, a producer may use over 24 tracks just for their drum kits. Simply put, when you add in guitars, keyboards, background vocals, and other instruments, music producing typically involves processing much more information than a radio spot does.

While there may be more to produce in music than a radio spot, that doesn’t mean that production is handled all that differently. Both producers are still going to critique and spruce up the vocals of a song or commercial. Both are most likely going to use some EQ and reverb effects on the voice, however they may use these effects differently to get a desired sound. This mostly depends on the type of song or the radio spot. The artist may want their voice to lay low in the mix and not be the main feature while radio ad may want the reverb to distort the vocals in a stylish way and draw attention to it.

All differences aside, at the end of the day radio and music producers want to do one important thing and that is to sell their product. Both of them want you to hear their work and either go out and buy their advertised product or event ticket, or go out and buy their artist’s album.


Dave Gravelle
Summer 2011 Intern
Penn State