Looking at Radio Promotion

I spoke yesterday with Mark Rini at Groov Marketing in Hollywood. They now handle all radio promo for Blue Note, and come highly recommended from people I met at the IAJE in January. I think I'm getting ready to do the radio promo push. I asked him if I should coordinate radio play with a tour, and he said it was alright to just do radio first, that would help me get tour dates later. He asked if I had distribution; I said no. He said it would take 4-5 months to get it, but they can work with an artist who only has Internet sales, it's just harder because many jazz listeners are older and want to be able to go into Tower Records to buy a copy of your album. But again, he recommended going ahead with promo, and using the results as impetus for getting a distribution deal on my next album. The distributors he recommended were City Hall and North Country. I'll look into them, but on the whole I found his advice reassuring. I told him about being featured at the top of the hour on Listen Here with Mark Ruffin and Neil Tesser in Chicago, and he said that was huge. But he also said (and I had already learned this in at the IAJE) not to send out any more CDs because it will dilute the effect of a radio promotion campaign and make it harder to place high on the JazzWeek charts. I'm sending him a copy of the CD today. I hope he likes it!