THE REAL GUIDE ABOUT SUBMISSION PLATFORMS:
MAY 24th, 2023 - WRITTEN BY JORDI ESQUERRA
Versión en EspañolThis is not another fancy and superficial article about the coolest submission platforms to send your music.
This is a serious guide, written word by word by a real person, to offer a broader perspective about the playlists/submission platforms subworld, whether you have used them before or not.
For those unfamiliar with Vibey Curator, I’m a Barcelona-based music blogger, curator and artist/producer. I’m 100% independent and have no interest in promoting any particular service. The following text does include some personal preferences but I did my best to be as objective as possible.
I wrote this guide to help artists to get familiar with it, avoid frustration, wasting money and bust some myths about it. I’ve experienced most platforms from both sides, as an artist and curator, so I think it will provide some valuable insights.
From talking with artists and from my own experience, I realized that often bad experiences come from having wrong expectations, using the wrong submission platform for your interests, or not properly filtering curators and influencers.
I’ll start by clarifying that I wrote the following tips assuming that the sound quality of your track is up to industry standards, which is a key factor for success 99% of the time. Also, I’m assuming that your goal as an artist is not simply to get a lot of streams, but high-quality streams. So I will simply ignore any kind of “hundreds of thousands of streams guaranteed” model, as it is directly against Spotify terms of service. Also results are usually obtained by fraudulent/artificial streams that might lead to your track being removed from the streaming platform itself. It has happened before.
You can skip the following paragraphs if you are already familiar with streaming platforms’ algorithms and what high-quality streams are, otherwise here you have a brief explanation:
The ultimate goal of any streaming platform’s algorithm, like any social network, is to find the perfect content (songs) to suggest to each particular user to keep them engaged and hooked to the platform.
So algorithms are constantly tracking behaviour, how users interact with each particular song and the actions that the song triggers in the listener to evaluate how well a track works in different scenarios and who its potential audience is.
It determines that a song works well when: it has a low skip ratio, it often leads to people saving the song, adding it to personal playlists, listening again, visiting your artist profile and, more importantly, clicking the follow button on your artist profile. While its potential audience is generally determined by the environment where your music is consumed, the place where listeners discover your track and which other artists are featured there, the interests/artists that the people who liked the song have in common, etc.
If the algorithm decides that your track works really well and has good engagement, it will determine that it is worthwhile to suggest it to a larger portion of its potential audience by adding it to algorithmic playlists. Additionally, it will improve your reputation as an artist with the algorithm for future releases. The people behind editorial playlists see all this kind of data, so it's easy for them to see which songs are standing out.
Therefore, it is really important to put your music in front of the right audience. These are high-quality streams: streams from fans of the artists that influenced your music who will be more likely to engage better with your track and your artist profile and teach the algorithm that your music is really good while associating you with those artists.
Getting featured in playlists that have nothing to do with your music will highly increase the chances of low-quality streams: listeners not actively interacting with your song, or worse, directly skipping your track, or associating you with the wrong artists or low-quality artists.
Ok, back to submission platforms. There are mainly two models to submit for playlist consideration through submission platforms. I call them the “Drop by drop” model and the “Full campaign” model. Generally each platform is focused on one particular model, although some are offering both (or sort of).
“DROP BY DROP” MODEL:
The artist/representative manually picks each curator and spends a very small budget for each one. The most popular platforms are SubmitHub, Groover,...
Pros:
Full control over your budget and the capacity to manually filter which curators / playlists are relevant to your music.
Cheaper. Lower price per submission and freedom to spend only a few bucks. Some even allow you to send your music for free.
Add a human touch to your submissions, customize messages and create human relationships.
Higher presence of curators/playlists representing indie and not-much-popular music styles, so more relevant curators for that kind of artists. Therefore, better chances of high-quality streams.
Cons:
It requires a little more time from your side.
As the artist gets more involved in the task, it may generate more frustration when rejected.
Lower approval rate. Despite it isn’t necessarily a bad thing. More on that.
“FULL CAMPAIGN” MODEL:
The artists/representatives buy a campaign package and get their music sent to a bunch of curators chosen by the platform. The most popular ones would probably be PlaylistPush, SoundCampaign,...
Pros:
It requires a minimal amount of time.
Usually leads to a larger amount of streams.
Higher approval rate. Better results for lower-quality songs.
Often platforms filter the most negative feedback so artists don’t read it.
Good results for some highly popular genres, sometimes even excellent results.
Some huge playlists are only present here, as income per song for curators may be substantially higher in contrast with drop by drop platforms.
Cons:
They usually require a bigger initial investment as the minimum campaign cost may range between $100 to $300.
No control over where your budget goes and how properly it is used.
More expensive, as they tend to pay more to curators per review.
It may lead to wrong targeting and low-quality streams, as curator filtering is often unrefined and, in some platforms, curators are rewarded for approving songs regardless of the quality / genre match of the track.
Lower presence of curators/playlists representing indie or not-very-popular music styles. So usually lower quality streams for those kinds of artists.
MY ADVICE / RECOMMENDATION:
This might get me kicked from some platforms but the truth is that the “drop by drop” model is the only one I feel comfortable recommending under any circumstances. Especially for the genres I’m focusing on in my blog and playlists.
While it can’t be ignored that the “full campaign model” is delivering good results, and sometimes even amazing, for some artists, in my opinion the overall model is not trustworthy enough. Platforms are constantly evolving though, so this might change over time.
The drop by drop model is more transparent and you can get excellent results with a very small budget if you have a good “product”.
Of those “drop by drop” platforms, at this moment, my favorite one is, by far, SubmitHub.
Why? Because it is the only one that constantly audits its curators and that shows pretty accurate numbers of their real engagement, allowing artists to make informed decisions. That’s really important.
Also, it is the most efficient one as it has the most powerful tools to determine how well your song matches a particular curator. Compared with its competitors, it offers some extra tools to filter by “Similar artists”, curator’s engagement, quality, etc. Its interface is rather “technical” than “cool”, way more professional.
So, before submitting to a particular playlist, you can set some kind of expectation of the outcome: How good your track fits stylistically, an approximation of how many streams you will get (if accepted on a particular playlist), and how valuable is each curator’s feedback, according to how users rate/define it.
On the other hand, from the curator’s perspective, SubmitHub has some disadvantages. Despite being the platform whose philosophy I resonate the most with and being (by far) my favorite in terms of usability, interface, accessibility, amount/quality of submissions, etc. The maximum income per song a curator can get is still too low to take this task too seriously and rarely enough to venture into making it a part-time job, even if your playlists have thousands of monthly listeners.
Other platforms, especially on the campaign model side, offer substantially better income per song, from $1 to $15. More on the not-minor consequences of this matter in the “How to cope with feedback” section, later in this guide.
Also, having only 72 hours to review each song in SubmitHub demands a level of dedication way too high in contrast with the earnings per song. If, using their own words, “most curators are doing this as a hobby”, I think that it’s not fair to require them to do their job on such a tight schedule.
When would I recommend artists to use the campaign model?
I do recommend the campaign model in some cases. Artists might get interesting results if:
They make music amongst very popular genres, for example electro pop, techno, EDM, rock, commercial R&B,...
Their tracks are mainly consumed as background music: solo piano, study beats,... Those genres are well represented too in the platforms, so there are lower chances to get low-quality streams.
They have the urge to quickly increase the number of streams even at the expense of getting a nice amount of low-quality streams and hurting their artist profile. Those who prefer quantity over quality.
If you still want to use one of those platforms, I would recommend PlaylistPush, instead of SoundCampaign.
Free Submission platforms:
If your budget is literally 0 or pretty close to that, SubmitHub's free submissions are still your best option, but there's also DailyPlaylists and Soundplate, which allow you to submit for free to curators in exchange for following the curator's playlist and sometimes a few additional actions from your Spotify account.
The requirements to become a standard curator on those platforms are minimal, feedback is not required and you can’t know for sure if curators actually listened to your song, accepted or not. You might get your song added to some playlists with thousands of followers but results might be poor, especially algorithmic-wise, and it is not rare to notice suspicious and artificial streams.
In any case, there are some honest curators there, usually making their first steps, that might lead to more relevant opportunities in the future.
HOW TO COPE WITH FEEDBACK :
This subject is so relevant that I decided it is better to put some light here before talking about platform usage / strategies.
Feedback is a delicate matter as artists are obviously sensitive about their work. It is responsible for most of the anger, rejection and frustration that cause some artists to refuse to use submission platforms or to criticize it bitterly.
If you’ve used submission platforms in the past, you’ve probably received all kinds of feedback: detailed, vague and generic, helpful, not relevant at all, technical, purely subjective, polite, rude, honest, contradictory,... Some feedback will hurt you and might ruin your day, some will be encouraging and will brighten up your day. You will find curators that will be really thoughtful and point out some critical aspects that will help you grow as an artist.
That diversity has different explanations but there are two important things here to keep in mind:
Curators need to find a balance between the time they spend listening and writing feedback and the income they receive per song.
I cannot highlight this enough. This is a message for the platforms too. Let’s make some numbers. If we think of curating as a typical job with a salary. What would be a decent wage per hour, in your opinion? If we set an approximate average income for curators of $1 per song:
The average hourly wage in the US is around $29.8, the equivalent of $4768 per month. That means spending 2:01 minutes maximum listening and writing feedback per song.
The minimum federal hourly wage in the US is $7.25, the equivalent of $1160 per month. Way under the cost of living in many “developed” countries. That is equivalent to spending 8:20 minutes maximum listening and writing feedback per song. That might seem reasonable enough. You can even make the exercise of timing yourself listening to a song and writing feedback about it. But curators have fixed costs, which ones? Typically from $5 to $25 every day to maintain the engagement of their playlists + website/blog maintenance + extra streaming platform subscriptions, to name a few.
In summary, curators usually need to spend only a limited amount of time per song, not just to be profitable / worthwhile but to not lose money, and curators having to do their job fast translates into lower quality feedback. It is sort of a vicious circle.
It's one of the reasons why artists at times get contradictory feedback or seem to be rejected for one reason and the opposite. Sometimes it's easier for a curator to say that it doesn't quite fit the mood/subgenres/vibe instead of making an in-depth analysis about why the song didn't spark their interest. Especially for "correct" songs: they are not bad but there's nothing special there, nothing standing out. It's not easy to say that without hurting somehow, and being completely honest, even in a polite way, is riskier as it's much easier to get bad ratings from artists.
Spending a nice amount of time per song and writing thoughtful feedback isn’t barely incentivized, or incentivized at all, by submission platforms. At most, the curator will receive a fancy badge or a little bump on their quality rate but nothing valuable enough to compensate for their time. Anyway, should it be incentivised if many artists are not much interested in feedback?
Often the return from the artists is really poor or non-existent too. I have sent very passionate acceptance messages on some songs I really enjoyed, posted extra Instagram stories about songs, made blog entries for free and written very detailed feedback pointing out key aspects to improve that took me more than one hour for only $1 and the artists' return was a simple “Thanks!” or no reply at all. Curator’s job is often ungrateful too.
So, if you are an artist and it is really important to you to get in-depth and thoughtful feedback, submission platforms might not be the best place and budget to get that. There are other platforms for that.
Despite the fact that some platforms say curators must write feedback because artists are paying for that, in my opinion platforms mainly require feedback from curators to prove to the artist that they listened to the song, offer a reasonable explanation of their decision and put more distance between their model and payola.
Not all curators have a strong musical background and they don’t have to.
As I said earlier, I'm an artist and producer, so I'm able to provide in-depth feedback, at least about the genres of my expertise. But some curators are not good at analyzing a track and struggle to provide useful, relevant or technical feedback. Sometimes it might be pure laziness or they would need more time than the available. You can make the exercise of asking a few of your non-musician friends, or even better, random people, to write feedback on your track in a few minutes and compare it with reviews you get from submission platforms.
In any case, the ability/will to write quality feedback has nothing to do with the relevance and engagement of a playlist. They don’t need to be professional reviewers. When curators apply to any platform, they don’t have to prove the quality of their feedback, ever. Platforms are making efforts to improve the quality of feedback and provide some useful tips to curators. Still, they are only asked to prove the relevance of their playlists.
So if your primary goal for submitting a song is to get featured in hot playlists, you must learn to handle this and relativize feedback. To filter when it’s valuable from when it’s not.
Some platforms like SubmitHub allow you to choose what kind of feedback you want: “Specific and honest”, “Be Gentle” or “No feedback at all”. My advice is to always choose “Specific and honest”, even if you are not going to read it. Why? Besides being able to have different perspectives and opinions about your music, which is often interesting, most of the time family, friends and other musicians tend to save things that might hurt you and usually only tell you how much they liked it.
You would also be losing opportunities to make new human relationships, learn which curators are relevant, which ones to save as favorites and which to discard on your next release. That is even valuable for professional musicians.
Also, statistics say that submissions that ask for “No feedback” have a much lesser approval rate.
FINDING THE RIGHT CURATORS/PLAYLISTS :
This section covers “drop by drop” platforms in a broader way. It does not cover the “full campaign” model, as genre tags are usually the only real choice.
I thought it didn’t make sense to explain in detail each platform usage as they all have some sort of strategy guide or articles on their websites.
In any case, a track might be a good match not only if it matches the genres of a particular playlist but also its mood and overall vibe. Some playlists are pretty broad, but some of them have a very specific focus. For example, within a genre, they might be only looking for chill songs, some might prefer electronic elements over acoustic instruments, some might be more inclined to not-commercial songs, only cover songs, only songs with lyrics, with a length below 3 minutes,... Also, the curator's personal taste has to be accounted for as a factor.
Too often, rejection is due to the song not fitting the curator’s playlist catalog, so the artist itself has room to avoid it by doing a good filtering job.
You can spend as much or as little as you want by being more or less strict on your filters and, if desired, by adding an optional extra manual research to filter even more to avoid spending some money on playlists that can be easily identified as not relevant for your track.
That additional research may consist of checking out some potential playlists in Spotify, reading its description and taking a quick look at the artists featured to have a better idea of their mood and vibe and how much of a good fit it is. Maybe even listening to a few songs. Some platforms ease this process by providing tools to check out playlist content within the platform itself.
If you have some free time, this research might be interesting, especially if you have a very low budget.
Getting familiar with a playlist's content and editorial line will also allow you to write more customized messages to curators that you resonate with and try to establish a closer and more personal kind of relationship. Like “Hey ! I love your playlist “Nu-Funk | Alt R&B | Indie Soul Picks”. I’m a big fan of Vulfpeck and Allen Stone, actually they were big influences on this new track I’m releasing next week, so I think it might be a perfect fit!”. Curators usually appreciate this and your chances for success and approval ratio will increase.
But not everybody has the time or the patience to do that, and that's ok. So the necessity and extent of that additional research is usually determined by your available time, budget, curiosity and the number of curators matching your previous filters,...
The easiest way to waste your money here is to choose the wrong genres or to choose the wrong platform.
As I mentioned earlier, it is really important to note that some platforms provide more powerful tools than others, so choosing the right platform saves you money.
Some only offer you to filter by genre and playlist followers (which might have nothing to do with its actual real monthly listeners). Others (read SubmitHub) allow you to filter by similar artists, curator's quality, see the playlists’ real engagement, how consistent is their genre focus, etc. So what in one platform filtering may result in a list of 200 relevant curators matching your track, in another one with more powerful tools, it might be only 50.
A few final tips:
Keep a level head while using submission platforms.
Getting too anxious to promote your music often leads to ending up too angry or frustrated even by the inevitable percent of rejection. Get familiar with how platforms work and have realistic expectations.
Expect guaranteed results and hundreds of thousands of streams by only spending a few dollars.
Sometimes it does happen, but it’s not what you should expect. That’s why platforms with a monthly listener estimation for each playlist are helpful in setting realistic expectations for every playlist addition.
Approval rate:
Something around 10-20% is commonly considered pretty good, sometimes even for established musicians. A few days ago, I felt awful for rejecting one track. It was a collaboration between two artists I love and have followed for years. The song was really good and matched the genres of my playlist, but it was too chill and atmospheric for its vibe.
Songs not 100% up to industry standards.
It’s okay to promote songs that are not 100% up to industry standards, you might get some valuable feedback at a very low price but rejection will be much higher and you might even get 0 approvals. Remember that you are “competing” with songs that had experienced professionals on each of its different stages: songwriters, performers, producers, mixing and mastering engineers,etc.
I’ve made this mistake in the past. I’ve tried to promote some songs that were not good enough in the past. The musical ideas were awesome, at least in my opinion, but there was room for improvement on the recording quality. The mix was made by a friend with very limited experience and we were still in a very early stage in our career as musicians. My first campaigns were pretty bad but results improved as the quality of my songs improved too.
If it's not up to the industry standard, that material is still valid for many things. It is often necessary for the artist's own process and development and it might be good enough to send as a demo to a label, sign a recording deal, to post on your socials and to engage with people and increase your fanbase. But probably it won't be good enough to be featured in a playlist amongst professional tracks from established artists, as curators do care about the quality of their content. Unless there's something really really unique and special about your music or sound.
Wrong balance between recording quality and promotion:
I’m not saying you can’t get professional quality tracks unless you spend thousands of dollars. I’m saying that it makes no sense to hire a cheap and inexperienced engineer to mix and master your song for $50 and then spend $500 in promotion for that track. You will get much better results by doing the opposite.
The best investment is to invest in having a good “product”. If the quality of your track is technically and artistically good, results usually follow. Many times with a little promotion effort. Music lovers (including curators) are hungry for hot new music. Even the Spotify algorithm needs new "products" to offer to its clients. Nothing makes a curator happier than to be sent a hot song that matches one of their playlists.
Nobody wants to have a curator profile showing <1% acceptance rate. Curators are willing to accept music and have a more attractive profile.
Relying only upon submission platforms to promote your track:
You can do that but playlisting is usually only one leg of an artist’s efforts on promotion, often including word of mouth, socials, press, other media coverage, marketing, sync, etc. Each service has its particularities. It is not rare to fail on one side and to be really successful on the other.
Using more than one submission platform:
It’s okay but I wouldn’t recommend using more than one platform from the same model/type unless you write down which curators you have submitted to, as they tend to be populated by the same curators. If you want to promote on two different platforms, it might be a good option to simply choose the best drop by drop platform and the best full campaign platform.
Different genres, different moods, different results:
An important thing to be aware of is that different music styles work very differently on submission platforms. Not only approval ratio differ between genres, also the number of curators/playlists available (opportunities) and the average results each approval provides are often proportional to the genre popularity or how music of a certain mood is consumed.
For example, Solo Piano or Study Beats have a pretty good acceptance rate, many curators are focusing on those styles and results are often counted in thousands of streams. There are huge user-generated playlists with dozens of thousands of listeners consuming that kind of music for many hours a day on repeat while studying, relaxing or doing other things without even caring about who is the artist behind, so curators are less picky because the listener is not paying the same amount of attention to the quality of the track. They often have a worse save ratio but they may be pretty good to “stimulate” the algorithm. Some interesting data about how friendly are the different music genres on this link.
Final Message
I think that I'm not missing any important point. So if you found it helpful and plan to use submission platforms, you can find interesting discounts through the following link. Those links will allow you to indirectly support my blog and my work while getting lowered prices.
I’ll be happy to hear your thoughts, personal experiences, anything you miss in this article or corrections. If you have any further questions or want to say hello, you can always write me at jordi@vibeycurator.com .
I cannot say goodbye without inviting you to check out my blog and playlists, which I carefully curate for my friends, family, fellow artists and music lovers and myself.
Jordi - Vibey Curator