Let Music Blogs and Spotify Playlist Curators Promote Your Music

So you've positioned your song to be released on a certain day. Maybe it's DistroKid or CD Baby, or one of those distribution services. Maybe you're doing it yourself, but you're going to have a release date and you're trying to figure out what can I do next?

Well, here's a really easy thing to do. Get your song blogged about by people that blog about music on the internet or some website, (I don't think they do magazines much anymore). This will give you a lot of credibility for your artists' brand and show people that you're a legit artist.

The tool I'm going to show you is called SubmitHub,  and it's super easy to use. Anybody can use it! There is a little bit of a charge, but it's totally worth the money in my opinion. And it's a way of getting your music into playlists like a Spotify playlist, YouTube, that kind of thing. Check it out.

I use a service - a website called SubmitHub - and the link is here. You start your account, upload your artistry and your songs into it. From there, you can easily submit your songs to curators.

On the list of curators are people that basically put together playlists for Spotify or YouTube or Pandora or Apple music, things like that. Also, some of these curators are record labels. And some of them are just influencers, like people that just have a lot of influence on Instagram or TikTok.

These people are connected to Spotify. And the reason why they are connected is because they make a little bit of money every time they review songs. When they take your songs and blog about it, that kind of thing.

And this whole site is changing constantly. So what I tell you right now could be a little different when you start to do this, but in theory, this is a hub - SubmitHub is a hub for you to get your music into the hands of people that are looking for your music.

I like to use it to get my music blogged about or to get it into Spotify playlists. The first thing you do is you buy credits. Credits, there's a whole scale of how to get them. For example, if you buy five it's six bucks. It's essentially about a buck a piece per credit.

The more you buy, the more of a discount you get. So if you buy a hundred credits, it's $80 bucks. Now this is going to be some of the best money you'll ever spend on your song, but only do this if you're really sure about your songs.

If you are just putting together a demo, you may be just wasting money by using this. But I strongly suggest using this as a super easy way to get attention to your song.

I'm going to show you what I do with this now. I've already submitted this song to different to five campaigns that I've built with this. You can see the campaign results down here. I've had 11 approvals and a bunch of people have passed on it. And that's actually normal. Eleven approvals is actually pretty good!

Most of the time you're going to submit to people and they're going to say, 'Hey, this is great, but it's not really what we're looking for because they're looking for a specific type of song or sound.'.

That is totally normal. You need to get used hearing the word 'no' and moving forward and not letting it get you down. So we're going to submit this again.

Now, since I've already uploaded this song, I don't have to upload it again, but we're going to do "Curators". Note that there are different groups. You can send it to record labels, influencers (like TikTok) and things like that, or to curators. For this example, we're going to send it to curators.

Now it asks me 'what kind of credits do you want to use?' I like to use premium credits. It costs a little bit of money, but again, if you pay for the credits, you get better results. SubmitHub allows you to easily send your music to curators using either standard or premium "credits." Each curator requests between 1 and 3 credits.

If you use premium credits, you can expect a decision within 48 hours. For a curator to earn your credits, they will need to listen to at least 20 seconds of your song, and if they don't like it they'll need to explain why.

If a curator decides that they like your song, they'll let you know when and how they plan to share it. You'll be able to chat with them about the release, and share any information you think they might need for their coverage.

The current approval rate is 20% for premium submissions and 4% for standard submissions. If you don't want to pay anything, you can send your stuff using the standard way and it's completely free. I suggest using the premium credits.

It then asks 'do you want feedback or don't want feedback'. I like the input, and I always ask for feedback. The reason why is it helps me know that there's somebody listening to it. If they have to write something about the song, that means they really have to analyze whether or not they want it or not want it. They can't just click through it really fast.

Next, you indicate if you want them to monetize your song. For example, if they have a channel or something like that on YouTube, and you want to allow them to monetize it - you can let them monetize it. I always put the "cannot" because I work in sync licensing in a different route with licensing agents.

Next, you indicate what genre you want indicated, and you hit 'next'.

Now I've already filled this out before, so it's going to retrieve the previous data. I don't have to submit all that information each time. And this is where you're going to pick what kind of curators you're looking for right off the bat.

I like to find curators that are bloggers and in Spotify. So I'm going to click bloggers here because I like bloggers. And I want it into Spotify playlists. If you want, you can say response rate above 80%. That means they're really good at responding.

Then I hide outlets in 'weekend' mode. If you didn't have this checked, a response might just say it might say 'Hey, I'm out on vacation" or something. It's just a waste of your time and money in that situation. So I suggest selecting the weekend option.

Next, you go through and you find bloggers. This is a blogger and they have done a ton of folk and indie songs. That's what they're looking for. You can see what they are looking for here. "Highlighted the finest of underrated music, curated by journalist musicians, quality content, and proper play listing." So I liked that one, and i'm going to go ahead and click that.

As you scroll through the curators, you can see various pieces of data, for example, what country the curator is based in, along with other bits of information. Scroll through and decide to include or exclude in your submission.

This one, "The Review" I'm going to click that one. "Looking for music that's non-commercial and avoids the repetitive cookie cutter approach." I think I've already submitted here. I don't know about that one, but I'm going go ahead and click this one. And this is 'one looking for strong vocal hooks' my song has a very strong vocal hooks. Click. We'll do this one, and I think I've already done that.

So let's say I'm good to go. I've found some people that I want to send to. They have a playlist. They're good bloggers. And I'm going to hit submit. Next, you get to add a little bit of information to include. For example, "I put several ear hooks in this song to take note of, it's written to give a little hope to my friends around the world who are struggling with COVID challenges."

It also gives suggestions - "This is a third new song." "If you blog about it, we'll send it to our fans" - whatever you want to say, but just a quick line of information that makes it a little more personal. Put your email in and then just click submit and you're done.

You're going to start getting emails back with yes or no. So let's take a look at some of the responses I've gotten back for this song. These are from the last campaign I did.

A total of 21 responses. Two of them refunded because they they just never respond. They only have a few days to check out your song when you submit to them. And if they don't, you will get your credits back, which is really cool.

So let's just look at the approved. This was approved by four different people in this campaign, and this person put it in a Spotify playlist. This one as well, this one also, etc. Someone the other day actually blogged about it. I can't remember which campaign it was in. So that's fun!

It's always fun when people write up your song, it's just really fun to share that with your fan base and say, 'Hey, our song was recognized on this blog,' which is really cool. Send them the link!

It's easy as that!

I'm telling you, this is so fun to do! I really, really enjoy sending my song to curators and bloggers and seeing what happens - and creating a little buzz. This doesn't have to be a brand new released song. This can be songs from your past that you want to see if somebody will blog about, or just get it into other playlists and bring new life to some of your old music.

I strongly suggest doing this with music that you know is of good quality that would fit in somebody's playlist. Get ready to receive a ton of, 'Hey, this isn't right for us.' And 'no, this is just not what we're looking for.' That happens constantly. It's okay. In fact, you can turn off the emails that are declining the song so that you're not bombarded with receiving 'No, we don't want it. No, we don't want it.' Because that can kind of get a little old, you'll only get the emails that say, 'Hey, we love it! We'd love to put it into our playlist!'. And then you can share it on social media.

So this is a great way for any artists, small indie artists - to create buzz about their brand and about their new releases. To bring credibility to your website so that when you are actually going to have an interview or get invited to a podcast or trying to get a gig somewhere, you have credibility that people have written about your songs and your songs have been shared across different platforms.

Plus if it gets into a lot of Spotify playlist, you're going to trigger the algorithms of playlist and they're going to start bringing your songs automatically into their playlist. And then the sky is the limit!

You can get a lot more streams and plays!

I hope that helped. I'd love to know your thoughts and feelings about this. If you love or even hate SubmitHub, or if you've found a different way, send me a note. I'd love to know your thoughts. Click the link if you want to go and use their tool. I think it's awesome!

Make Better Music,

Zion