Brazilian radio stations accepting music submissions

Brazil is a very large radio country with a very small commercial door and a very large non-commercial one. Commercial FM runs on sertanejo, pagode and international pop delivered by promoters, and an unsigned artist is not getting in that way. What Brazil does have, in unusual depth, is the rádio universitária sector: full-power educational stations attached to federal and state universities in almost every capital city, plus a legally protected network of rádios comunitárias. Both take submissions. Here is how the landscape works, built on the 35 verified Brazilian stations in the directory.

The rádio universitária sector

This is the backbone. Brazilian universities have been running stations since the 1950s and there are now around a hundred of them, concentrated in the federal universities but present in state and private institutions too.

The verified stations show how the sector is distributed: Universitaria FM at UFU in Uberlândia, Rádio Universitária FM 107.9 at UFC in Fortaleza, Rádio Web UFPA in Belém, UniFM at UFSM in Santa Maria, Radio Universidade FM at UFMA in São Luís, FURG FM in Rio Grande, Radio USP in São Paulo, Rádio Unesp FM in Bauru, Rádio UEL FM in Londrina, Radio da Universidade at UFRGS in Porto Alegre, and Rádio Educativa UFMS in Campo Grande. Alongside them are municipal public stations with a similar cultural remit, such as Frei Caneca FM, run by the city of Recife.

How Brazilian university radio differs from US college radio

This is the part worth understanding before you write a single email, because assuming these stations behave like KEXP's student cousins will get you ignored.

Most Brazilian university stations operate under a radiodifusão educativa concession, the educational broadcasting licence. That licence forbids commercial advertising, so the stations are funded by university budgets and by cultural support arrangements rather than ad sales. They are usually run by the university's communications department, with professional broadcasters and technicians on staff and students working alongside them, not by a student club. Most broadcast at full FM power across an entire city, so a play reaches a general audience rather than a dorm. A handful are AM or internet only, Rádio da Universidade at UFRGS being on AM and Rádio Web UFPA being online, so check the frequency on the listing before you assume city-wide FM reach. And the educational concession comes with a cultural and public-service obligation baked into it.

All of that shapes the music. Look at what the verified Brazilian stations actually play and the pattern jumps out: MPB, samba, jazz, bossa nova, choro, classical, frevo, singer-songwriter material, regional music. UFRGS's station leans classical and opera. UFPE's Recife station carries samba, classical and frevo. UEL FM in Londrina programmes singer-songwriter, MPB and jazz. There is rock and hip hop in the sector too, at UFSM and UFC among others, but the centre of gravity is considerably more cultural and considerably less noisy than American college radio.

If you make lo-fi bedroom indie or heavy guitar music, this means being honest with yourself about fit before you spend a week on emails. If you make anything acoustic, jazz-adjacent, songwriterly or rooted in a tradition, Brazilian university radio is one of the most welcoming sectors anywhere in the world.

Radios comunitarias

The other sector is community radio, defined and protected by federal law since 1998. A rádio comunitária is licensed to a non-profit association based in the community it serves, broadcasts on FM at a maximum of 25 watts with a coverage radius of roughly a kilometre, and is required by law to keep its programming plural and open to the people who live in that area.

The trade-off is obvious and worth stating plainly: the reach of any single community station is a neighbourhood, not a city. What you get in exchange is a genuinely open door, hosts with total freedom over their hour, and a real relationship if your music has any local connection. For an artist based in Brazil these are excellent early wins and often the first place anybody plays you on air. For an artist outside Brazil they are less efficient than the university sector. The general method is in how to submit music to community radio.

Every Brazilian listing in the directory carries a contact I have checked by hand and shows the city, the genres the station actually programmes, and a working contact, so you can filter to the stations whose repertoire matches yours instead of mailing all of them. Submission policies vary from station to station, so where one publishes a stance I show it on that station's own page.

How to pitch a Brazilian station

Write in Portuguese, and Brazilian Portuguese rather than European. This is the single biggest filter. A short, correct message in Portuguese gets read; an English press release gets deleted.

Name the programme and the presenter. Say who you are and where you are from in one line, and if you are outside Brazil, say so honestly and say why the record belongs on that show anyway. Describe the music in terms that connect to what the station already plays, and if there is a genuine link to a Brazilian tradition, name it accurately rather than reaching for it, because the people programming these shows will know instantly if you are guessing.

Send a private stream plus a downloadable, properly tagged file at broadcast quality, with composer and performer credits filled in, since educational stations report their plays and incomplete metadata causes real problems downstream. Offer an interview or a live session, because these stations have airtime to fill with talk and culture and an artist conversation fits their remit perfectly.

Keep it to one screen and time it a couple of weeks ahead of release. The structure is in how to write a music pitch email.

Register to collect on Brazilian airplay

Brazil centralises collection through ECAD, which gathers public performance royalties nationally and distributes them to both authorship rights holders and neighbouring rights holders: composers, publishers, performers, session musicians and the owners of the recordings. You cannot deal with ECAD directly as an individual. You affiliate with one of the associations that make up ECAD, such as UBC or ABRAMUS, and register your works and recordings through them. Plays on tracks that are not registered sit in the system as pending until somebody claims them, so do this before the airplay starts rather than after.

Match the repertoire, then pitch the show

Brazilian university radio will play an unknown artist. It will not play a record that clearly does not belong on the station. So do the unglamorous part first: read what each station actually programmes, pick the ones your music genuinely fits, then pitch a named show rather than a general inbox. Open the verified Brazilian stations, filter by genre and city, and work down the list. A Heard membership is $39 a year and unlocks the real emails and submission forms behind every listing in a directory of 1,900+ verified radio stations worldwide.