I've been looking at some websites [PlaylistPush, Tunemunk] that claim to be able to promote your tracks and guarantee placement on big playlists. The costs are quite high, being a minumum of around $200 up to around $1,500. Has anyone tried these and can vouch for them being legit?
I’ve been on here toting how great Playlist Push is for getting on decent Spotify playlists after seeing others post on here. It is expensive but was excited to go from 0 to ~300 plays a day. That being said, review of play behavior and analytics has led me to believe that all the plays are from bots, which is quite disappointing. Our followers went from 4 to 120 and now back down to 7. All within a month. Anyone have similar experiences?
Interested in these 2 companies wanted to know if any other artist have had experience with either? Big single dropping soon looking for more marketing
Anyone using that rip off site [although it works] , rip off because the prices are insane... Had probably AWFUL, SKEWED, UNREAL , RUDE feedback from curators. They are on complete crack, just writing something so they get paid for a review.
Well yeah, just got 10gbp from Spotify from that scam playlist push site, but I paid goddamn 1.200$ ? Are they insane?
Note: This is a long read so if you're not interested in my experience you can scroll down to the "Conclusion" section where I give my opinion.
I am only speaking from my own experience. I have read a lot of different views and cases from different people on this site with both good and bad experiences. This is just one more to add to those for reference, in hopes that it will help you guys make a more informed decision whether to use these services and how to approach using them. I am offering my opinion which may differ from others based on their experiences. It should also be noted that I only aimed to get my songs on playlists and didn't care much for blog features or feedback.
How it works
You buy premium credits which cost roughly $1 per credit. There are different packages but basically the more you buy the more discount you get. You can then use these credits to submit your song to blogs/playlist curators/labels to listen and they will decide whether to share it or not. Typically it will cost 1 credit per submission, with a few blogs/curators that charge up to 2 or 3 credits because they are of higher quality [this can mean a variety of different things but typically it's because their reach/audience is higher or they provide better feedback etc]. Your credit is spent whether or not they share the song, but they are required to give you feedback if your song is rejected. There is a lot of info on the site about the bloggers you can submit to, including but not limited to their approval rate, their audience count and sources, the songs that they recently shared, etc. It should be noted that there is a free credit system where you receive 2 credits per day [can not be accumulated] I believe. Some blogs take free credits but IMO any blog worth submitting to usually would only take premium credits.
My experience
When I first discovered SubmitHub I was ecstatic that this platform existed to directly connect artists with curators/bloggers. I explored the site and everything seemed straight forward enough. So I purchased a bunch of credits, filtered the blogs based on the genre of my newly released track and started submitting away. I did this for a couple days and the results started coming in. I think I submitted to over 100 curators [combination of premium and free credits but mostly premium] and of the ones that responded not one wanted to share my song. That's right - 100 rejections.
At this point I was quite discouraged to say the least and was tempted to give up. Perhaps my music wasn't good enough or my genre of music just wasn't a big hit on the site. Ultimately though I decided to take this as a learning experience rather than surrendering. I did some more research, reading some SubmitHub success stories and tips [the site has its own resource link for tips]. I took in all the feedback with an accepting mentality and aimed to improve my own craft based on the criticism. I realized that the average approval rate of the site is quite low at 11%. My own 0% approval was even lower, but knowing that it's a tough field to begin with was actually encouraging to me, since there is more of a chance it's not my music that completely sucks. Most importantly, I learned that I didn't do enough research on the curators I submitted to.
As mentioned above, there is a lot of info about the curators that I completely overlooked. I only filtered out the genres and started submitting. Here's the thing about genres - there is a ton on the site for you to choose from and I find that a lot of times they are interpretive. For example "Commercial" music can mean one thing to someone and something else to another. What I started to do was go through the list of curators one by one. I listened to their recently shared tracks. I listened to more songs on their actual playlists. I also took into account their approval rate. There are curators that actually approve 100% of their submissions, which are ones you might want to avoid because the quality of their lists/listeners may be questionable. And then there are curators that have below 1% approval rate, reflecting how tough their standards are. I filtered the curators down to the ones with around 15% - 30% approval rate because I wanted my song submitted to quality lists but at the same time have a fighting chance. The priority though is making sure my song is a good fit with that of the curator's list. After many hours of research, my shortlist of curators was at around 20. And so I launched a submission campaign with this more fine tuned list. After a couple days all my results came in. Of the 20 submissions, 15 responded, and 8 approved my track to be shared/added on their playlist. 5 credits refunded to me. I was stoked. That's over 50% that approved my track, which is actually higher than the overall average and miles ahead of my original campaign. Now the range of quality of the shares was quite broad. Most were quite good, adding my song to lists with hundreds of listeners and some cases thousands. There was a curator though that added my song to a playlist with 2 listeners. Whatever. Coming from 100 rejections I took every approval/share as a big win. Also kept in mind that any playlist add is good for the Spotify algorithm and helps with chances of getting your song added to an editorial playlist which in my mind is the ultimate goal.
How it Works
You launch a campaign by first submitting your already released Spotify track to see if it qualifies. I think it takes at most one day for them to get back to you. Once they approve your track you can get started [I imagine it is very rare that they will reject your track for a campaign]. You start by typing in some similar artists to yourself and some genres will be assigned to your song. You can modify these genres [subtracting what they assigned or adding some that they missed]. Once you are happy with classifying your song into the genres, the next step is selecting the budget for your song. 3 options are offered: "Precise", "Accurate", "Broad". Here is a screenshot of what it looks like.
PlaylistPush campaign packages
The pricing is dependent on the genre of your song. Some genres are more expensive than others depending on how many curators they have. You're looking at this right - it's quite pricey. From the PlaylistPush site itself, "The average campaign cost is around $450. However, pricing can range from as low as $250 to $1,000+ depending on which genres and matching you select." After all is done and finalized you just wait 2 weeks for all your results to come in.
My Experience
You will see in the image that there is a small button at the bottom "More Price Options." From there I was able to select the cheapest campaign possible at $202.50 [everyone's budget is different, but I just don't have several hundred dollars to easily spare]. For that price my song was submitted to 19 playlists. After I finalized the campaign there was nothing else to do but wait for the results. You have no control over which curators your song goes to and there is no info about the curators and their playlists. You just have to trust the site's algorithm to send your song the right curators in terms of genre matching. The whole process has a much more "automated" feel. If you do the math, that's approximately $10.65 per submission which is 10 times more expensive than SubmitHub. Now if you go with the more expensive packages, the price per submission does goes down. But nevertheless still not very cheap to say the least. The important question is if it's worth it. These were my results: 10 curators added my song while 9 rejected it. All came back with some brief feedback as that's what's required. All the playlist adds were on decent lists with at least several hundred followers. Results will definitely vary from song to song but 10 out of 19 was something I was quite happy with.
One thing I want to clarify is that this isn't a "versus" type comparison review where I choose a winner among the two. I think both platforms have its merits. If you only look at my results though, you will see that I was able to spend $15 on SubmitHub to get 8 playlist adds [not counting the first $100 I spent not knowing how to properly utilize the site], and on PlaylistPush I spent $202.50 for 10 playlist adds. So does SubmitHub have way more value? Not necessarily. Keep in mind that along with the $15, I spent hours and hours researching curators to come up with my shortlist to submit to. One hour can be worth a lot depending on who you talk to. Moreover, every hour doing something else [like researching curators] is one less hour for you to work on creating music. For PlaylistPush I just filled out a digital form and hit "go". So even though you can say PlaylistPush is way more pricey, I believe the extra premium is for the convenience, time saved, and more of a guarantee on the playlist quality. I would say that PlaylistPush has a higher bar for their pool of curators and playlists in terms of number of followers and active listeners. SubmitHub on the other hand is all over the place with that. You might get scenarios where some curators are actually primarily music bloggers that happen to have a playlist with a few followers. To be fair though SubmitHub is very transparent with that and provides sufficient data for you to make an informed decision. Honestly, I think that for all the data and info you can obtain from SubmitHub, $1 per submission is dirt cheap. It is up to you to assess all that data though.
So if you have a limited budget and lots of time and energy to spare, I'd say give SubmitHub a shot. If you have a higher marketing budget and don't have much free time, PlaylistPush can be a good tool for you. How long your track stays on the approved playlists is entirely up to the curator but I believe the minimum is one week. How rewarding these campaigns are will vary case by case. You will definitely see a spike in monthly listeners if you get a few playlist adds but when your song eventually gets taken down it's hard to say if you can maintain that momentum. During this time of exposure gaining new followers and track saves will be key stats to look out for IMO. For me it worked out quite well as my track got saved a few hundred times and that's a lot for me.
I've seen the words "scam" and "payola" thrown around a lot. Usually from people who have had a bad experience with the sites or from people who don't really know the basic concept of the platforms. Based on the definition of payola, the fact that there are so many rejections among both sites is already an indication they are not that. As for the label "scam", this is mostly from people who used the sites and didn't get the results they wanted [ie. got rejected a lot]. If you read through the documentation and FAQs on the sites, they are very upfront with what to expect if you use the platform. SubmitHub clearly states that the average approval rate is quite low [at 11%]. Some people say the feedback quality is poor and some say they feel generic. Some say that they got good things said about their song but was rejected so that makes no sense. I'll be honest that I didn't care too much about that part because I was mainly focused on getting playlist shares. Here's the thing. These curators probably listen to hundreds or thousands of songs in a month. There's only so many ways to reject you or tell you that your song is not a good fit for their list and not necessarily because they don't like it. They have probably dealt with their fair share of artists with fragile egos and have learnt to be polite [maybe overly so] when giving you bad news. Hey I get it. I'm an artist too and it doesn't feel great when others tell you that your music is not good enough. It's very easy to fall into the trap of being defensive and projecting the blame on everything else but your own music. For me a scam is when there is an intent to cheat you somehow. When these sites are upfront and clear what you are walking into, I think everything is fair game.
That's all. I see that this has become quite a long post. I hope it helps those of you looking for more case studies of these platforms.
Tags: Submihub review, Submit Hub review, Playlistpush review, Playlist Push review.