How to Send Promos to DJs in 2026

A DJ with a decent profile gets somewhere between fifty and several hundred promos a week. They open a handful. Not because they are ungrateful — because opening all of them is a part-time job nobody is paying them for, and because most of what arrives is not remotely close to what they play.

That is the whole problem, and it is worth stating plainly before any of the tactics below: you are not competing for a DJ's approval, you are competing for their attention. Everything that works follows from that.

Send to fewer people

The instinct with a promo list is to make it bigger. It is the wrong instinct, and it is the one that quietly kills your next three releases.

Ask any DJ what they dislike about promo email and the answer comes back the same: it is the wrong music. Not too many emails in the abstract — the wrong music, from people who obviously did not check. A house DJ getting drum and bass. A club DJ getting ambient. Every one of those teaches them that your name is not worth opening, and that lesson sticks to the sender, not the track.

So the useful move is subtraction. Before you send anything:

• Sort by evidence. Who has played you before? Who replied last time? Who has actually posted a set with something adjacent to your record in it? Those people go first, in a smaller send.
• Cut anyone you cannot justify. If you cannot say in one sentence why this specific DJ would play this specific track, they are not on the list. "They play techno and this is techno" is not that sentence.
• Do not buy a list. It is the fastest route to a burned sending domain, and a burned domain follows you to every future release. The damage lands on you, not on whoever sold you the addresses.

Forty people who might genuinely play the record will do more for you than four hundred who will not — and the forty are the ones who will still open your email next year.

Get the timing right

Three to four weeks before release is the working default for most electronic releases. That gives a DJ time to actually hear the thing, sit with it, and play it out before it comes out — which is the entire point of a promo, as opposed to an announcement.

Two other timing rules worth keeping:

• Send once, follow up once, then stop. A single polite follow-up after ten days is fine. A third email is not.
• Do not send on Friday. It is the busiest promo day of the week and the day DJs are least likely to be at a desk.

What the email actually has to carry

A promo email is not a pitch. It is a delivery. The DJ's question is "can I hear this in ten seconds and use it if I like it", and the email either answers that or gets closed.

The things that decide it:

A stream that works on a phone, without a login. Most promos are triaged on a phone, in transit, between other things. If your link opens a download manager, a sign-up wall or a broken player, that is the end of it. Streaming first, downloading second.

The download in the format DJs actually use. 320kbps MP3 as the baseline, WAV or AIFF available for anyone who wants it. If your only option is a Google Drive folder of unlabelled files, you have made your track harder to play than the fifty other tracks in the inbox.

Correct tags on the file. Artist, title, label, release date, ideally key and BPM. A DJ who imports your track and sees "final_master_v3.wav" will not be able to find it later even if they liked it, and a track nobody can find is a track nobody plays.

Three lines of context, maximum. Who you are, what the record is, when it is out and on which label. No biography, no adjectives, no "I think you'll love this". The music does that part or it does not.

One release at a time. Sending your back catalogue is asking someone to do curation work for you.

Ask for something specific

This is the part most artists get wrong, and it is the easiest to fix.

"Let me know what you think" is a request for an essay. It arrives at somebody who has ninety other things to listen to, and the honest cost of answering it is ten minutes they do not have. So it goes unanswered, and you conclude DJs do not give feedback.

What actually gets answered is a question that takes fifteen seconds:

• a rating,
• which track of the two they preferred,
• and whether they would play it — in a club, on radio, in a stream, or not at all.

That is a form, not a conversation, and DJs will fill it in because it respects their time. It also gives you something you can use: "seven of the twenty said they would play it, five of those in a club, and they all picked the B-side" is a marketing decision. "Nice one mate" is not.

A useful piece of leverage here: put the download behind the reaction. Not as a trick — as an exchange. The DJ who wants your track has a reason to spend the fifteen seconds, and the DJ who does not was never going to reply anyway.

Then read what comes back

The reason to collect structured reactions is not the ego hit. It is that a promo round is the cheapest market research you will ever run, and it happens before you have spent anything on the release.

If the B-side outscores the A-side, that is your lead single. If nobody in the club column would play it but the radio people all would, you have a different record than you thought. If the same four DJs support everything you send, that is the start of a real relationship rather than a mailing list — and those four should get the next one first, a week early, with an actual note.

Keep the list. Prune it. The value compounds: a promo list of a hundred DJs who consistently open your email is worth more than any single release on it.

Where Promo Box fits

We built Promo Box around the two halves above — the send and the answer.

Each recipient gets their own private link rather than one URL you paste into every email, and the campaign can be set to expire. Recipients stream on a phone, and the download opens once they have left a reaction: a 0–10 rating, a favourite track, and per-track "will you play this, and where". Those reactions land in your dashboard next to the campaign they belong to, not scattered across your inbox during release week.

The list side is deliberately opt-in. An industry contact who has not opted in gets a consent request rather than your track — they say yes before they are ever sent a record. That is slower than buying a list and it is the reason your domain is still working in two years. Contacts captured by your download gates flow into the same list automatically, so the fans who traded an address for an exclusive edit and the DJs who play you live in one place.

Being straight about the limits: GYM Pools — DJs who opted into a genre inbox so you can reach people you have never met — are opening genre by genre and are not open to every genre yet. (What a promo pool actually is, and how to tell an opted-in one from a scraped list.) We do not watermark the audio itself, so if you need per-copy forensic tracing on a high-profile release, a label-scale promo service is the right tool. And if what you want is a list of two thousand strangers to mail on Friday, we are not going to be able to help.

Before you send

• Is every name on this list someone you can justify in one sentence?
• Does the link stream on a phone, with no login?
• Are the files tagged with artist, title, label and release date?
• Is the ask small enough to answer in fifteen seconds?
• Are you three to four weeks out?
• Is there one follow-up planned, and only one?

That is most of it. The rest is the record.

---

Keep going: What is a DJ promo pool? · How to get on a label's radar · Getting your first 100 fans · Smart links done right · Pre-save vs download gate · Bio link tools for DJs · What it costs to release a track