Why SubmitHub Has Become So Important For The Independent Record Labels And Artists
We had a pleasant chat with Jason Grishkoff, founder of SubmitHub, to discover the true potential and value of his platform in the super competitive music scene we're living in nowadays.
11 years ago, Jason Grishkoff was caught between the walls of Googleplex, working 9to6 for the tech giant. This is how he fed his rational left side of his brain. Indie Shuffle, the music discovery blog he started back then, was a project meant to bring balance into his life, just to please his senses with sounds coming from the independent side of the music scene. As things started to take off (300 emails per day, almost all of them from artists requesting feedback for their music, sounds pretty scary, right?), he came out with the SubmitHub idea: a place where, for a fee as small as USD 0.50, musicians can connect with tastemakers to receive feedback and eventually coverage and exposure.
That was 5 years ago, with SubmitHub being used mainly as a tool for the IndieShuffle submissions. Now SubmitHub morphed into one important piece of the music marketing puzzle for independent artists and record labels. From EDM to indie folk, from hip hop to psy trance, almost all musical genres are covered on the platform. And the curatos palette is huge: Spotify playlisters, Youtube channels, music blogs, instagram accounts and many more. How efficient it is? What’s the best way to use it? Is it worth it? We tried to answear all these and a bunch of other question in a super fun-to-read interview with Jason. Read on!
Hey, Jason, thank you for accepting our invitation. How did you handle this mad 2020 until now?
It’s definitely been quite an interesting year! More and more people online than ever - which means more and more work for us at SubmitHub. Add the covid19 lockdowns and the fact that I’ve got two young children and, well, you could definitely call it “mad”.
All that said, I’ve still got a level head about me. So I count myself fortunate to have “survived” without physical or emotional damage :)
Through your Indie Shuffle project, you are connected with the independent music scene for quite some time. How was it, for an independent artist to promote his music, in times when digital streaming services like Apple Music or Spotify, were not so powerful and important?
I started blogging back in 2008/2009 when Torrents and MP3 downloads were king. In fact, our blog probably got a lot of early attention because people were looking for MP3s to download. As a result, we found ourselves constantly being hounded by these “content cop” companies that were hired by major labels to get blogs to stop hosting MP3s. There was nothing scarier than getting one of those legal-jargon DMCA takedowns!
In ~2010 SoundCloud came along and saved the day by giving us access to a nifty embed for pretty much any song we wanted — without actually getting in trouble. Whew! It marked a turning point for artists as well, who were suddenly able to easily and cheaply distribute their song to as many blogs as they could. Ultimately, that led to my answer for your next question…
Do you remember how you got the idea of creating SubmitHub?
It was because of my slowly-building frustration about the 300+ emails I was getting daily from artists, labels, and more - all looking for coverage on my blog. The internet clearly made it too easy for anyone with a keyboard to reach out with an unsolicited pitch, and it had become impossible to keep up with. I figured there had to be a better system for managing it all.
Take us on a quick guided tour through SubmitHub, about some features we’re curious how they are working: for example the quality score and the influence score for the curators present in SubmitHub. How do you calculate these?
A quick guided tour, eh? By text? Might not be so easy!
I suppose the best place to start is to know what SubmitHub does. To summarize that as best as I can, I’d say: SubmitHub is a tool that makes it easy for musicians to contact curators in a transparent way.
I italicized “transparent way” because it is the key to the second part of your question regarding the “influence” and “quality” scores. Over the years we’ve managed to collect a lot of data about each curator/influencer on SubmitHub, and we try to share as much of this as we can with the artists who are using the service. The influence score reflects each outlet’s audience “engagement” relative to all the other outlets on SubmitHub. The quality score is more about their behavior on SubmitHub.
There’s actually a really in-depth article I wrote about the influence score that you can find here .
I can only presume that artists are coming with high expectations towards a service like SubmitHub. What’s the disappointment rate you’re dealing with?
That’s been one of our biggest challenges over the years. A quick search of Google for the words “SubmitHub scam” will turn up a bunch of artists who had their expectations deflated on the website.
I can’t blame them. The music industry is tough. Really tough. And SubmitHub curators often forget there’s a human on the other side. They’re quick to judge, and sometimes harsh in doing so.
That said, we don’t get that many complaints about it (considering the volume of users) because we make sure that they come into the process fully aware that it can be a complete ego blow. Once you understand that it becomes much easier to digest :)
Talking now to Jason the music curator: what’s the most important thing you looking at, when it comes to filtering tracks received through your submission gates: the pitch text, the artwork, the artist popularity and fanbase… Of course, apart from the quality of music, which should be the first criteria :)
For me it’s entirely about the song itself. I don’t care as much about the pitch or artist. The song has to sound good. Obviously that’s a very subjective thing that can vary from month-to-month.
I’ve moulded SubmitHub to follow a similar pattern for other curators: decisions should be based first-and-foremost on the song itself, not how many followers an artist has.
One remarkable story, with a song sent through SubmitHub that really took off to a huge number of streams & plays?.
One story I like is about Mitya. He’s an eccentric Russian artist — very talented — who has sent a lot of songs to Indie Shuffle via SubmitHub. We eventually bit on one of those submissions, and following our coverage on Indie Shuffle he ended up getting placed on a Netflix soundtrack. Dylan wrote an article about it here .
Are there any musical genres more suitable to SubmitHub than others?
Yes and no. SubmitHub has gotten so big that at this point it tends to reflect the broader digital population’s musical preference. There are more curators to send to within “mainstream” genres such as pop, rock or EDM. But if you’re in a niche there’s still an audience for you.
What are the requirements for me, a Youtube channel or Spotify playlist, to be on the list of curators at SubmitHub?
Good question, and the answer tends to be constantly changing! We’ve learned over time that “followers” aren’t the best metric to look at. Instead, our primary focus is on each outlet’s audience engagement. That said, there are still a few minimum thresholds that need to be cleared. For example:
—Spotify playlisters need at least 1 playlist with 1,000 followers
— YouTube channels need at least 10,000 subscribers
— Blogs need to have been active for 6+ months and have consistently good coverage in that time
Any future development plans at SH? Where do you see it in the coming years, especially now, with all this coronavirus context?
Well, we’ve been quick to follow the “influencer/TikTok” game that everyone’s talking about. So our most-recent big update was rolling out the ability to send your music to TikTok users for video coverage.
Going into next year there aren’t actually any major plans. I tend to be one of those “figure it out as you go” product developers ;-)
3 tracks you discovered through SubmitHub and you’re still in love with them
You’ll find way more than that here → pretty much all of those songs are SubmitHub discoveries :)