Behind the Music
Steve Ager
Posted: 4 February 2020
We speak to the man responsible for first putting Nirvana on the radio waves. Steve Ager has been a radio plugger for over 20 years and is most known for being the man to first get Nirvana’s Nevermind album on the radio. Amongst other things, Steve now runs his own PR firm, Chachaman PR and is also a number one selling artist in India.
Read time - 10mins
How would you describe the role of a radio plugger to someone who has never heard of it?
We lobby radio stations, but we also supply them with content. We are the people who take the tracks from record labels and try to get them played on the radio. The secret is to try and have new records alongside good records so that they want to see you as much as you want to see them. The longer you do that for, the better your friendship with the station becomes. That’s how I managed to survive so long as I’d made so many good friends and I knew what music they liked so I knew what to play to them. I knew who to go to with what music.
There are many ways of looking at plugging. We are a filter system to the radio industry. We are a point of contact between TV, radio and record labels, management and artists.