This episode was previously published on the Profitable Musician Show.
Jason Grishkoff of SubmitHub talks about how their platform makes it incredibly easy for artists to send music to influencers and creators. This is one way to grow your business and get known in the music industry.
It was in 2018 when I started using SubmitHub to take some song submissions for the Women of Substance Podcast. We take submissions from SubmitHub and Broadjam among others. SubmitHub is a great place to meet a lot of artists. I have also been recommending it to my students at Rock Your Next Release since it is a great place to get some placements, especially when you are releasing music.
Jason started a music blog in 2018 called Indie Shuffle which still runs until today. For a while, music blogs were the ones who could make or break an artist. Many acts headlining festivals such as Coachella, Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza were all discovered through music blogs and a website called Hype Machine. People spend $300 a ticket on these festivals. Indie Shuffle was invited to these events.
Originally, he received very targeted emails but eventually he began to receive 100, 200 or 300 untargeted emails. Eventually he filtered submissions through IndieShuffle.com and also funneled every email there. There was a time between 2012 to 2015 where there was little new music discovery. They weren’t making money anymore and music blogs started giving up.
Jason had an opportunity to even dabble with the idea of being a full-time music blogger. That is the context and history that leads up to the creation of SubmitHub. He was working at Google in 2013, and he quit becoming a full-time blogger. By the time 2015 rolled around, things weren’t working out as well. He was faced with the choice of either trying something else or going back to Google and begging for a job. He did a lot of freelancing where he was building websites for other music blogs. He knew how to code these players. Jason is a self-taught coder and he learned a lot in the process and leveled up his game a lot.
As SubmitHub gets older, there’s a broader and broader spectrum of influence of curators, influencers, labels on there to cover all of these niches. They even have things like flamenco and salsa. Those are genres on SubmitHub but they started with five genres, and now they’re at about 160. t’s getting more and more granular as time goes on. By the end of 2022, it’s going to be even more granular in terms of how much choice artists have and how well they can target.
EveryNoise.com is another curator platform you have to check. It’s an incredible website and is now owned by Spotify but it has every noise on it. They basically have every single genre that exists in this crazy spider web pattern. You can see all the links between them, click on any genre, and listen to that sound.
SubmitHub has a great system to make sure that curators are sharing what they say they’re going to share, getting all the information that they need or the copyrights all being covered. It developed over time.
Jason oiginally created SubmitHub for himself but it eventually evolved over time to meet the needs of the people who use it. When someone approved something, it becomes an added feature. For example, one guy approved 300 songs in a row but the songs weren’t shared. SubmitHub added an extra step to mark it as shared. One other feature added over time was copyright approvals. People try to cheat the system but it’s good that almost everything can be done with code.
They also have a chat room for bloggers and artists so people from SubmitHub can connect directly with the people and understand their pain points and the system’s opportunities for improvement. Jason likes to push out half-baked products and develop them as they go. As of now, they are working something out for artists who receive a lot of rejections. It is not recommended for curators to approve every submission they get. Those with a higher than 50% approval rate, depending on how many songs they receive daily, are probably not doing a good job of curating. It’s very likely to have an unengaged audience.
SubmitHub is available in fifteen languages. Influencers on the platform are quite a diverse group. They feel that internally, they can do a better job of creating campaigns than a new artist camp. It’s like a money investing strategy.
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