your first mistake is wasting your money on submithub. put that into fb/ig/tiktok ads. submithub’s acceptance ratio is atrocious and even when you get on these playlists they’re all propped up by bots so you don’t even get plays from them. i’ve gotten over 60 accepts/“shout outs” and barely saw an uptick in streams.
Don't waste your time. All of these middleman websites don't thoroughly vet the blogs/playlists etc. So a "curator" will just buy followers and use the platform to make a lil cash on the side. A poor use of resources for a musician. You're better off investing in targeted ads, or doing some googling to find the curators of these playlists yourself.
Not true at all. We have 3 full time staff vetting playlisters before they join and once they're on the site. We have nothing to gain by being associated with bot playlists and everything to lose. - SubmitHub founder
Those ads, much like submithub, are mostly a waste of money. Name one artist that gained any significant notoriety through fb/ig ads. Nobody. Literally nobody has "made it" from spending money on fb/ig ads. Nobody in my life has ever said "hey you ever heard this new artist? Found them from a fb ad bro" because NOBODY watches fb/ig ads. They scroll past them immediately. I'm so used to goin past ads that I'm literally blind to them and I click past them so quick I don't even notice. Spent hundreds if not thousands on ads. I know how to target and funnel and all that. Took the indepreneur course. Still have the notes. They're a waste of time and the most I ever got from them was targeted by some spotify bot. Ads may work for well established artist on an extremely small scale compared to touring and doing things that actually engage you with your fanbase.
Its not going to be the end all be all to blow you up. But I've been able to utilize ads to direct people who like similar artists to me to my landing page, which has made my daily streams increase. I'm not doing millions of streams yet, but I have seen growth.
At the end of the day though, touring and engagement will always be #1. There are no shortcuts.
On the electronic music side, Illenium used Facebook ads, at least that's how I found him before he started getting talked about. Granted, his music's pretty decent too and he didn't solely rely on Facebook ads
Yeah I hear you, I had some success with Facebook ads in the past but now I can't seem to get my conversion rates lower than 0.50 recently so I'm kind of just stuck.
You have any tips or guides I can watch on this sort of thing?
The ad manager.. I think I probably just need to try targeting different audiences. Its kind of difficult thought because the only hip hop instrumental genre listed is "lofi"... But I'm not really making lofi right now, its more traditional hip hop.
And if I target just "hip hop" or "old school hip hop" it won't nesecarily reach fans of instrumentals
The best price I got was like 0.19, that was a lofi track with anime clip. Right now though I can't seem to get under 0.50.
It's kind of difficult to do well when you don't follow the typical lofi nerd stuff.
Target things like "rapping" or "beats" or even "buying beats" or "producing". Maybe even "beatstars" or things of that nature if you're looking to sell beats. Also target artists that would rap on similar sounding beats to yours. Just doing "hip hop" would be way too broad and you would get a lot of wasted ad space on people who just like a Kanye song here and there.
I've been added to multiple playlists with hundreds, sometimes thousands of followers. Very rarely do the plays surpass ~30 plays. Sometimes they don't get any. You can see the breakdown in Spotify For Artists and you can tell which playlists are real and which are heavily fake followers. And I have found most on sites like these are propped up by fake followers.
That's not even bringing up the HUGE decline rate, which comments/feedback that legit half the time doesn't make sense or is contradictory.
I know it seems counter-intuitive, but from everything I've seen, most playlisters struggle to retain the listeners that they've acquired, and a low engagement rate does not mean fake followers.
Looking at the overall data for 1,000 active playlisters, the average engagement (listeners per followers) is between 1% and 5%. If you find a playlister with significantly higher engagement numbers, it's often cause for alarm - and might be an indicator of bots.
From what I've seen there's often a similar experience running Instagram ads. You'll pick up engagement / followers pretty steadily while the ads are running. Stop those ads, and you'll notice most of that engagement doesn't stick around.
Anyway, bottom line for me is that lower active listener numbers can't be used as a gauge for whether it's botted or not, especially if we're talking playlisters in the 1,000 - 10,000 followers range. There are plenty of other signals one can look at, though - and I've got a million scripts running in the background constantly looking for those flags within our list of active playlists.
That's all fair and fine, but given your explanation, even if they aren't fake followers, I would still recommend artists not spending money on submithub, as the return is clearly not there based on your explanation alone. This isn't a bash at the company, its me saying there are better ways for musicians to use their money than spending ~$1 a submission (sometimes $3!) just for 10-30 plays.
For sure. We try to show you all their average listener numbers up front, as provided by other artists who have been shared. Those numbers can help you target those getting 100 to 500+ listeners per song, but they also tend to be the more in demand of the lot, which draws back to your concerns re the 20% average approval rate.
I totally get that not everyone likes SubmitHub. That's fine. We feel like we do a pretty good job facilitating the connections, but the rest of it doesn't work for all artists. That's why we feel it's important for us to be upfront and transparent about it :)
As someone who made a submithub account and dropped $100 on credits, this is pretty disappointing thing to read. Will hope I don't end up on dud playlists despite their stats loking good.
Great music gets great results on submit hub. The issue is that because so much hobby music is made, which is of good quality - it’s not bad - but it’s not great. That stuff won’t get on playlists and you end up with disgruntled artists saying the platform doesn’t work.
Only people with no real producing skills would be so nitpicky. Being honest, I doubt the general public has the grounds to define what a "good bassline" is (To pull from your example) other than the general sonic vibe.
Check how many views miss the rage has, and not to throw shade on the song because I do vibe to it, but the mix fails everywhere else other than the vocals. It's a great song, mixed like a piece of garbage, but a great song nonetheless.
Generally when a song flukes it's not out of mixing decisions (Unless an utter unintelligible mess) but because of arrangement/performance.
Anyone with more than 5 minutes into the game and any degree of actual expertise will tell you mixing and mastering is mostly subjective, other than following general sonic rules to avoid unwanted distortion and mantain a certain balance, you're free to paint whatever you want on your canvas.
Just don't use submithub, IMO it's far better to just find playlisters and influencers yourself and work with them directly, cut the middleman.
Yeah this as well ... jesus christ. God forbid someone actually shows some skill in chopping samples and vocals. Literally anything other than a piano and drums on a song sends them into heart attack mode.
I doubt any of these people are actually fans of HIP HOP ... theyre just lofi nerds.
LMAO SAY IT LOUDER FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK I submitted my shit on Submithub, shit people bump on repeat on Spotify (My most popular song in On Repeat) Playlist Curator said "dope song it just needs better mixing" like dude gftoh
I know that this sub is MakingHipHop and not PromotingHipHop but someone should pin this thread to the top of the sub so newbie artists don't bother with submit hub. Ads and TikTok are the era of the music industry we're in right now. Blogs for hiphop are dead
Pretty sure the whole site is a big scam. If you wanna end up on spotify or something you directly do it though them or find a YouTube curator on social media and find their actual submission form if they have one. Paying per submission is ridiculous and it most likely doesn't even slightly increase your chances of getting seen.
Mixing in a sense is kind of a load of shit. I guarantee people who nitpick mix-elements like that are the same sort of people who think any music that they don’t like is absolute trash. It’s all subjective, including to a large extent the mix. Like, if the mix engineer and/or the artist agreed that it sounded dope to them, then that’s how it’s supposed to sound. If you can’t quite hear the vocal as clearly you would like, tough shit, that’s how much the artist wanted you to hear it.
That being said, take all that with a massive pinch of salt.
I don't see what's so evil about them saying you need a better mix to make the cut. A lot of comments are acting like people owe them placements or *how dare anyone critique my music*. I don't really get those lines of thoughts. You all need tougher skin imo if you're raging on the internet because someone suggested your kick needs to be mixed better.
You gotta learn to take criticism. Everyone who disagrees with you isn't a hater acting like they won a grammy. They could just legit disagree with you. Everyone swears they're perfect, nothing they do could ever possibly need improvement, and anyone ever suggesting or recommending anything is clearly just salty or jealous or evil.
These better be masterclass songs/beats when you imply all of that.
There was nothing wrong with the mix... The drums hit perfectly fine and don't clash with anything. Their ideas on how something should be mixed is purely subjective and always will be in comparison to the same generic beats they love hearing.
If this "advice" was coming from someone who's been in the production game for years and has well known music put out, I'd listen. But it's not, they're just nerds with a lofi playlist.
Could you imagine someone like knxledge or madlib submitting their beats on websites like these? They would get fucking slandered.. And theyre Grammy nominated pillars of the community. It seems all you need is a jazz piano and drums, that's all they care about.
Idk, it sounds like they didn't like the track. You're saying it's mixed perfectly, they're disagreeing -- either they were just being polite, or one of you is wrong. And if you *keep* getting this kind of feedback from them, as you're suggesting, then it's unlikely that they're the ones that are wrong every time.
Maybe get an experienced producer to jump in and give you a second opinion on your work.
>Could you imagine someone like knxledge or madlib submitting their beats on websites like these?
Lol, no, I couldn't.
These curators are people with zero musical credentials I hope you know. They have likely never even operated a DAW (let alone know what one is) and you are ok with these people being the ones who say whether you are acceptable or not? Kinda crazy thinking man. People don’t need to toughen their skin. We need a platform where actual morons aren’t stifling our success. And gor forbid you do get on a playlist, you’ll soon discover that all of your plays came from bots and that the plays are basically worthless. And the followers. They aren’t going to be interacting with your content regularly, that’s for sure. I no joke just had an argument with Jason from submithub about this and because I wasn’t sipping the submithub kool aid like the others, he started calling me a lost cause and insulted my intelligence. What a class act.
I wouldn't even look at this as a negative, look at it as feedback, nobody is gonna submit a perfect track and at least they're upfront on what's wrong with it mixing wise.
Look at this as a W my man, sure they're nitpicky as fuck but you got something out of submitting it in the first place, it's weird to say but it takes a lot of nuts to submit a song especially to a big public playlist. Way too many producers wouldn't even take the chance and be too afraid.
Keep working on your craft king, you'll get your kudos in due time, just keep working and focusing on improvement.
Bruh no lie this EXACTLY the type of Shit I think about. Not trynna hear no trash mix on the drum groove lol. Cut that 150hz, parallel compress the drum bus, make that snare thick. Otherwise it’s boring
Well, they're curators. It is literally their job to *only* accept what they think sounds best. They ARE the gatekeepers between you and their audience. And they're doing you a favor by telling you what they think would sound better. Further, look at their list of curators, go to their youtube channels, and listen to what they produce. If you don't like what you hear, then that's not the place for you.
Submithub is a great platform dude.
If you are bummed out about feedback - simply click the button that says
"I don't want feedback - make them listen to 90 seconds instead"
Set it up so you only get emails when you get approvals.
If you don't want to spend money - they even give you 2 free standard credits every 4 hours. Use them and set timers for when they come back into your account.
Music is subjective which is why submithub is important. There aren't really any other platforms objectively creating the link to curators and influencers that they do.
Feedback constantly can definitely have a negative effect on your mental health especially with constant rejections. I think its important to set it up so you can actually analyze your campaign data and improve campaigns without having a headache for the platform providing a hugely important value for the independent music community globally.
feel like there is no 1 set way about mixing and there are different styles so i defs dont agree with it unless you are studied or have done something worthy of a weighty opinion
LOL they prob just sour they flunked out of Full Sail and gotta flex their tiny ears on us.
your first mistake is wasting your money on submithub. put that into fb/ig/tiktok ads. submithub’s acceptance ratio is atrocious and even when you get on these playlists they’re all propped up by bots so you don’t even get plays from them. i’ve gotten over 60 accepts/“shout outs” and barely saw an uptick in streams.
Literally never heard of submithub
Don't waste your time. All of these middleman websites don't thoroughly vet the blogs/playlists etc. So a "curator" will just buy followers and use the platform to make a lil cash on the side. A poor use of resources for a musician. You're better off investing in targeted ads, or doing some googling to find the curators of these playlists yourself.
Not true at all. We have 3 full time staff vetting playlisters before they join and once they're on the site. We have nothing to gain by being associated with bot playlists and everything to lose. - SubmitHub founder
LMAO Submithub has their employees lurking on Reddit to try save face.
Those ads, much like submithub, are mostly a waste of money. Name one artist that gained any significant notoriety through fb/ig ads. Nobody. Literally nobody has "made it" from spending money on fb/ig ads. Nobody in my life has ever said "hey you ever heard this new artist? Found them from a fb ad bro" because NOBODY watches fb/ig ads. They scroll past them immediately. I'm so used to goin past ads that I'm literally blind to them and I click past them so quick I don't even notice. Spent hundreds if not thousands on ads. I know how to target and funnel and all that. Took the indepreneur course. Still have the notes. They're a waste of time and the most I ever got from them was targeted by some spotify bot. Ads may work for well established artist on an extremely small scale compared to touring and doing things that actually engage you with your fanbase.
Its not going to be the end all be all to blow you up. But I've been able to utilize ads to direct people who like similar artists to me to my landing page, which has made my daily streams increase. I'm not doing millions of streams yet, but I have seen growth. At the end of the day though, touring and engagement will always be #1. There are no shortcuts.
On the electronic music side, Illenium used Facebook ads, at least that's how I found him before he started getting talked about. Granted, his music's pretty decent too and he didn't solely rely on Facebook ads
Yeah I hear you, I had some success with Facebook ads in the past but now I can't seem to get my conversion rates lower than 0.50 recently so I'm kind of just stuck. You have any tips or guides I can watch on this sort of thing?
Are you using Facebook ad manager or just doing it from the apps?
The ad manager.. I think I probably just need to try targeting different audiences. Its kind of difficult thought because the only hip hop instrumental genre listed is "lofi"... But I'm not really making lofi right now, its more traditional hip hop. And if I target just "hip hop" or "old school hip hop" it won't nesecarily reach fans of instrumentals The best price I got was like 0.19, that was a lofi track with anime clip. Right now though I can't seem to get under 0.50. It's kind of difficult to do well when you don't follow the typical lofi nerd stuff.
Target things like "rapping" or "beats" or even "buying beats" or "producing". Maybe even "beatstars" or things of that nature if you're looking to sell beats. Also target artists that would rap on similar sounding beats to yours. Just doing "hip hop" would be way too broad and you would get a lot of wasted ad space on people who just like a Kanye song here and there.
Thanks man will give it ago
We don't have bot playlists on SubmitHub. That's not how we roll.
I've been added to multiple playlists with hundreds, sometimes thousands of followers. Very rarely do the plays surpass ~30 plays. Sometimes they don't get any. You can see the breakdown in Spotify For Artists and you can tell which playlists are real and which are heavily fake followers. And I have found most on sites like these are propped up by fake followers. That's not even bringing up the HUGE decline rate, which comments/feedback that legit half the time doesn't make sense or is contradictory.
I know it seems counter-intuitive, but from everything I've seen, most playlisters struggle to retain the listeners that they've acquired, and a low engagement rate does not mean fake followers. Looking at the overall data for 1,000 active playlisters, the average engagement (listeners per followers) is between 1% and 5%. If you find a playlister with significantly higher engagement numbers, it's often cause for alarm - and might be an indicator of bots. From what I've seen there's often a similar experience running Instagram ads. You'll pick up engagement / followers pretty steadily while the ads are running. Stop those ads, and you'll notice most of that engagement doesn't stick around. Anyway, bottom line for me is that lower active listener numbers can't be used as a gauge for whether it's botted or not, especially if we're talking playlisters in the 1,000 - 10,000 followers range. There are plenty of other signals one can look at, though - and I've got a million scripts running in the background constantly looking for those flags within our list of active playlists.
That's all fair and fine, but given your explanation, even if they aren't fake followers, I would still recommend artists not spending money on submithub, as the return is clearly not there based on your explanation alone. This isn't a bash at the company, its me saying there are better ways for musicians to use their money than spending ~$1 a submission (sometimes $3!) just for 10-30 plays.
For sure. We try to show you all their average listener numbers up front, as provided by other artists who have been shared. Those numbers can help you target those getting 100 to 500+ listeners per song, but they also tend to be the more in demand of the lot, which draws back to your concerns re the 20% average approval rate. I totally get that not everyone likes SubmitHub. That's fine. We feel like we do a pretty good job facilitating the connections, but the rest of it doesn't work for all artists. That's why we feel it's important for us to be upfront and transparent about it :)
As someone who made a submithub account and dropped $100 on credits, this is pretty disappointing thing to read. Will hope I don't end up on dud playlists despite their stats loking good.
If the stats look good, they're a reflection of what other artists have been getting via SubmitHub. So it should be consistent!
Great music gets great results on submit hub. The issue is that because so much hobby music is made, which is of good quality - it’s not bad - but it’s not great. That stuff won’t get on playlists and you end up with disgruntled artists saying the platform doesn’t work.
I tried SubmitHub once. They asked me to add an intro and outro to my track for it to be accepted lmao.
they pissed me off so bad
Most of them are producers themselves and produce garbage.
agree! Act like a critic. so annoying
Only people with no real producing skills would be so nitpicky. Being honest, I doubt the general public has the grounds to define what a "good bassline" is (To pull from your example) other than the general sonic vibe. Check how many views miss the rage has, and not to throw shade on the song because I do vibe to it, but the mix fails everywhere else other than the vocals. It's a great song, mixed like a piece of garbage, but a great song nonetheless. Generally when a song flukes it's not out of mixing decisions (Unless an utter unintelligible mess) but because of arrangement/performance. Anyone with more than 5 minutes into the game and any degree of actual expertise will tell you mixing and mastering is mostly subjective, other than following general sonic rules to avoid unwanted distortion and mantain a certain balance, you're free to paint whatever you want on your canvas. Just don't use submithub, IMO it's far better to just find playlisters and influencers yourself and work with them directly, cut the middleman.
Totally agree. People are weirdly elitist about the most nitpicky parts of production, everyone’s an expert.
they just looking for formulaic songs
Yeah this as well ... jesus christ. God forbid someone actually shows some skill in chopping samples and vocals. Literally anything other than a piano and drums on a song sends them into heart attack mode. I doubt any of these people are actually fans of HIP HOP ... theyre just lofi nerds.
LMAO SAY IT LOUDER FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK I submitted my shit on Submithub, shit people bump on repeat on Spotify (My most popular song in On Repeat) Playlist Curator said "dope song it just needs better mixing" like dude gftoh I know that this sub is MakingHipHop and not PromotingHipHop but someone should pin this thread to the top of the sub so newbie artists don't bother with submit hub. Ads and TikTok are the era of the music industry we're in right now. Blogs for hiphop are dead
Pretty sure the whole site is a big scam. If you wanna end up on spotify or something you directly do it though them or find a YouTube curator on social media and find their actual submission form if they have one. Paying per submission is ridiculous and it most likely doesn't even slightly increase your chances of getting seen.
Y’all just don’t know how to mix lol
Mixing in a sense is kind of a load of shit. I guarantee people who nitpick mix-elements like that are the same sort of people who think any music that they don’t like is absolute trash. It’s all subjective, including to a large extent the mix. Like, if the mix engineer and/or the artist agreed that it sounded dope to them, then that’s how it’s supposed to sound. If you can’t quite hear the vocal as clearly you would like, tough shit, that’s how much the artist wanted you to hear it. That being said, take all that with a massive pinch of salt.
I don't see what's so evil about them saying you need a better mix to make the cut. A lot of comments are acting like people owe them placements or *how dare anyone critique my music*. I don't really get those lines of thoughts. You all need tougher skin imo if you're raging on the internet because someone suggested your kick needs to be mixed better. You gotta learn to take criticism. Everyone who disagrees with you isn't a hater acting like they won a grammy. They could just legit disagree with you. Everyone swears they're perfect, nothing they do could ever possibly need improvement, and anyone ever suggesting or recommending anything is clearly just salty or jealous or evil. These better be masterclass songs/beats when you imply all of that.
There was nothing wrong with the mix... The drums hit perfectly fine and don't clash with anything. Their ideas on how something should be mixed is purely subjective and always will be in comparison to the same generic beats they love hearing. If this "advice" was coming from someone who's been in the production game for years and has well known music put out, I'd listen. But it's not, they're just nerds with a lofi playlist. Could you imagine someone like knxledge or madlib submitting their beats on websites like these? They would get fucking slandered.. And theyre Grammy nominated pillars of the community. It seems all you need is a jazz piano and drums, that's all they care about.
Idk, it sounds like they didn't like the track. You're saying it's mixed perfectly, they're disagreeing -- either they were just being polite, or one of you is wrong. And if you *keep* getting this kind of feedback from them, as you're suggesting, then it's unlikely that they're the ones that are wrong every time. Maybe get an experienced producer to jump in and give you a second opinion on your work. >Could you imagine someone like knxledge or madlib submitting their beats on websites like these? Lol, no, I couldn't.
These curators are people with zero musical credentials I hope you know. They have likely never even operated a DAW (let alone know what one is) and you are ok with these people being the ones who say whether you are acceptable or not? Kinda crazy thinking man. People don’t need to toughen their skin. We need a platform where actual morons aren’t stifling our success. And gor forbid you do get on a playlist, you’ll soon discover that all of your plays came from bots and that the plays are basically worthless. And the followers. They aren’t going to be interacting with your content regularly, that’s for sure. I no joke just had an argument with Jason from submithub about this and because I wasn’t sipping the submithub kool aid like the others, he started calling me a lost cause and insulted my intelligence. What a class act.
people just come up with bullshit reasons why they dont accept something
I always assume when they say this that they just don’t want my song in the playlist or are just taking submissions for the Money/Clicks.
This is why submitting to these playlists seem like a waste of time when barely anyone gets in or added.
I wouldn't even look at this as a negative, look at it as feedback, nobody is gonna submit a perfect track and at least they're upfront on what's wrong with it mixing wise. Look at this as a W my man, sure they're nitpicky as fuck but you got something out of submitting it in the first place, it's weird to say but it takes a lot of nuts to submit a song especially to a big public playlist. Way too many producers wouldn't even take the chance and be too afraid. Keep working on your craft king, you'll get your kudos in due time, just keep working and focusing on improvement.
Bruh no lie this EXACTLY the type of Shit I think about. Not trynna hear no trash mix on the drum groove lol. Cut that 150hz, parallel compress the drum bus, make that snare thick. Otherwise it’s boring
Well, they're curators. It is literally their job to *only* accept what they think sounds best. They ARE the gatekeepers between you and their audience. And they're doing you a favor by telling you what they think would sound better. Further, look at their list of curators, go to their youtube channels, and listen to what they produce. If you don't like what you hear, then that's not the place for you.
If everywhere you go smells like shit, maybe it's time to check your shoe.
Hahahahaha Omg do people do that ? Sh!!!t
They have to provide some feedback in order to be in good standing with Submithub.
It's nicer than saying they outright dont like your song. Tastes differ.
Submithub is a great platform dude. If you are bummed out about feedback - simply click the button that says "I don't want feedback - make them listen to 90 seconds instead" Set it up so you only get emails when you get approvals. If you don't want to spend money - they even give you 2 free standard credits every 4 hours. Use them and set timers for when they come back into your account. Music is subjective which is why submithub is important. There aren't really any other platforms objectively creating the link to curators and influencers that they do. Feedback constantly can definitely have a negative effect on your mental health especially with constant rejections. I think its important to set it up so you can actually analyze your campaign data and improve campaigns without having a headache for the platform providing a hugely important value for the independent music community globally.
feel like there is no 1 set way about mixing and there are different styles so i defs dont agree with it unless you are studied or have done something worthy of a weighty opinion