What Is Radio Airplay? Tools That Track Spins Globally

Travis Mckenzie

Jul 20, 2025

Understanding how your music performs on radio is crucial for building a successful release strategy. Radio airplay remains a key indicator of an artist's popularity, influencing everything from tour planning to sync licensing deals. As music promotion becomes more data-driven, having access to accurate radio airplay analytics can give artists and teams a strong competitive edge. The question is no longer what is radio airplay, but rather how you track and use that data effectively.

Today, three main platforms provide robust airplay tracking and analytics: Viberate, Chartmetric, and Songstats. Each offers different modules, visualizations, and reporting tools tailored to various professional needs. Below, we break down how these dashboards work and compare their features.

Viberate Airplay Analytics Dashboard

Viberate delivers a detailed dashboard that breaks down an artist's radio performance across several analytical modules. It gives artists and their teams the ability to track rankings, discover trends, monitor geographical performance, and understand station impact.

The Career Health on Radio Airplay module uses a gauge meter to visualize airplay strength and gives you a competitive landscape by showing where your artist stands among others in the same genre. Next, the 12-Month Overview aggregates total spins, number of stations, countries, and track diversity for the past year.

To analyze trends, the Spins Through Time graph lets you track airplay patterns month-by-month, with hover-over data for peak insights. The Most Spinned Tracks module ranks songs by spin count and helps determine which releases are evergreen.

Geographic performance is handled by Spins by Country and Spins by City. These modules use an interactive map to identify strong markets and local station support. For audience targeting and programming insights, the Radio Stations by Subgenres module shows airplay distribution by genre and overlap with other artists.

The Top Radio Stations module gives you sortable insights into your most supportive stations by location, spin count, and genre, while the Airtime Distribution module tracks when your songs are played throughout the day and week—crucial for scheduling campaigns. Finally, the Latest Radio Spins feature keeps a live log of airplay activity.

Viberate stands out for its visual clarity, geographic granularity, and real-time updates. The dashboard is particularly valuable for global campaigns and genre-specific benchmarking.

Chartmetric Radio Airplay Analytics

Chartmetric takes a top-down approach to airplay data. It focuses on combining high-level overviews with detailed breakdowns by city, country, track, and station.

The Summary Stats Module gives you the essentials: total plays, number of stations, cities, and countries reached. The map visualization highlights your top 50 cities and includes filters for timeframe and comparison across other artists. The export tool is helpful for external analysis and reporting.

The Total Plays Breakdown Module presents daily airplay counts using stacked bar charts. You can toggle between different views (tracks, stations, countries, and cities) to dig deeper into what’s working and where. The hover feature adds a layer of detail that helps reveal underlying trends.

The Top Tracks by Plays module gives a historical view of how each song has performed, including week-to-week movement, total plays, and the timing of first and last airplay. It also offers sorting and filtering to zero in on key tracks and regions.

Chartmetric excels in its comparative and export functionalities, making it a good fit for teams that need regular reporting and trend analysis. However, the UI is more technical and may not be as intuitive for casual users.

Songstats Radio Airplay Dashboard

Songstats focuses more on individual track performance than broad artist analytics. The dashboard is structured to help artists and managers quickly assess how a specific song is doing.

The Performance Overview summarizes plays, station count, SiriusXM exposure, and estimated royalties. It even includes a "Collect your Royalties" button, suggesting monetization integrations.

To spot trends, the Radio Airplay Trend Chart uses a customizable time selector and zoom slider for granular analysis. You can view weekly or daily changes and identify key growth moments.

The Stations & Locations module tells you where your track is being played, with separate views for station lists and geographic breakdowns. This is especially useful for tracking regional growth.

The Most Played Tracks module ranks your songs and offers quick access to their dedicated airplay analytics pages. Meanwhile, the Recently Played view gives a live feed of recent spins, complete with cover art and track details.

Songstats' strength lies in its user-friendly design and individual track-level focus. It’s a strong option for independent artists or managers who prioritize speed and simplicity over deep comparisons.

Conclusion

Each of the three tools offers valuable insights into radio airplay, but the choice depends on your specific needs:

• Viberate is best for in-depth artist-level analysis, real-time tracking, and geographic breakdowns.
• Chartmetric suits professionals who need structured overviews, historical trends, and cross-artist comparisons.
• Songstats focuses on actionable track-level data and monetization opportunities with an intuitive UI.

No matter which platform you choose, tracking airplay is essential for understanding how your music travels, who’s supporting it, and where to invest next. Armed with these tools, artists and managers can stop guessing and start planning their next moves with confidence.