Radio jingles are the fastest way to make a station sound bigger than it is, which is why a bedroom internet station with good imaging often sounds more professional than a licensed FM one without it. The confusing part is not whether to get them. It is which of the three routes to take, because the price gap between them runs from under fifty pounds to well over a thousand, and the cheapest option is genuinely the right answer for a lot of stations.
The Three Ways To Get Radio Jingles
Every station ends up on one of these, and moving up a tier is usually a decision about your station name, not your budget:
- Library packs. Ready-made jingles you download and play tonight. Generic lyrics, no station name sung, from around £39.50 a pack.
- Custom sung jingles. Singers record your actual station name over a produced track. Typically £155 to £265 for a package.
- Full station imaging. Jingles plus sweepers, beds, show opens and news imaging, built as one coherent sound. £399 upward.
The honest advice: if you are launching, or your station name might change in a year, buy a library pack and spend the difference on your website. Custom sung jingles are worth it the moment your name is the thing you want people to remember, and not a moment before.
Sung or Dry?
A sung jingle has vocals: real singers, harmonies, your name as the hook. A dry jingle, sometimes called a spoken or produced ID, is a voice over on music and effects with no singing. Sung costs more and sticks harder, because a melody survives being half-heard in a car in a way a spoken line does not. Dry is faster, cheaper and easier to refresh, which makes it the workhorse for anything that changes often: show titles, promos, seasonal messaging.
Most stations that sound good use both. Sung jingles for the station identity, which stays put for years, and dry production for everything that moves. If you want the long version of why the sung ones lodge in your head, our producer team dug through it in the history of the radio jingle, and there is a companion piece on what actually makes a jingle catchy.
What Is Inside a Jingle Package
Buyers expect a folder of songs and get a toolkit, so it helps to know the vocabulary before you order:
- Station IDs: the full sung logo, usually five to ten seconds.
- Shotguns: the very short stabs, one or two seconds, for talking over.
- Sweepers: produced transitions that carry you between songs or into the news.
- Liners: spoken lines over a bed, easy to update.
- Show opens and beds: the intro for each programme, plus music to talk over.
- Ramps: instrumental run-ins timed so you can talk up to the vocal.
A pack of ten well-cut IDs beats forty variations you never load into the playout system. Judge packages by how many you will actually use.
Three Packages, Three Budgets
The clearest way to see the ladder is to hear it. These three sit at each rung, and every one of them has a preview you can play before you spend anything:
The full custom range lives in our sung jingles collection, and if you need the transitions rather than the IDs, on air radio sweepers cover the between-songs job on their own.
How Stations Actually Order Them
Custom sung jingles are simpler to commission than most people expect. You pick the package by its musical style, send us your station name and any strapline, and the singers record your name into the existing arrangement. That is why a custom package costs a fraction of writing a melody from scratch: the expensive part, the composition and the session musicians, is already done. Turnaround is usually days rather than weeks.
Two things worth deciding before you order. First, how you want your name sung, because "Radio Seven" and "Seven FM" scan completely differently over the same track. Second, whether you want the strapline in the vocal, which locks the pack to a campaign and dates it faster. Stations that expect to rebrand should keep the sung part to the name alone.
Getting Your Station on the Air Sounding Right
If you take one thing from this: buy fewer jingles and load them properly. A station with six well-chosen IDs in the right places sounds tighter than one with sixty sitting unused on a hard drive. Start with a library pack if you are new, move to custom when your name is worth singing, and build out to full radio imaging when the whole station needs to sound like one thing. Hear the packages, pick the one that fits the music you play, and get your name on air.
