Let’s Attempt To Have A Rational Discussion About Submithub (again)
******If you want to try and have a rational conversation about Submithub—which, believe me, is no easy task—there are two important things that need to be kept in mind right from the beginning, otherwise the discussion quickly heads down illogical ego-driven roads that are near impossible to turn around from.
So let’s start off with the two important things:
IMPORTANT THING #1:
Submithub is just a tool.
It’s not some gatekeeping organization that employs curators to cash-in on rejecting desperate artists, it is simply a communication & functionality tool created for dealing with the problem of there being way more people creating / releasing / submitting music then it is possible for anyone to realistically continue to filter through via an email inbox on infinite loop.
And if you’re wondering how it is possible that so many artists experience almost nothing but rejection on Submithub—and therefore assume that must mean the site is not legit, because how could no one accept my musical art project, especially if I paid money to guarantee being listened to?—then you don’t have a realistic grasp on the number of submissions that even small blogs like mine get sent (for context: I’ve been sent over 36 THOUSAND submissions and counting in my 2.5 years on Submithub and, for over a year now, I’ve only been keeping my submission queue open about 8 days a month).
Like any tool, Submithub can be used in different ways by different people to accomplish different goals, and people also have the choice of whether they think it’s a tool worth using or not (I have only ever used the ‘receive music submissions for your blog’ part of the service, so that’s all I can speak on). If you focus on the massively improved functionality that Submithub provides to a process that previously was super dysfunctional (ie. the overrun music blog inbox filled with 1000s of unread/unanswered emails), you’ll find that most problems people have with ‘Submithub the tool’ usually can be traced back to individual tools that either use Submithub in frustrating ways (on both sides of the submission) or, more often the case, people who place all their unrealistic expectations of instant musical success on the backs of whether they spent money on Submithub or not (ie. it’s usually “I spent money and didn’t get accepted —therefore it’s a scam!” or “I didn’t spend money and that’s why I didn’t get accepted — therefore it’s a scam!” or there is also a decent dose of “I got accepted by a few places, but nothing substantial has come from that exposure yet — therefore it’s a scam!”).
Which is annoying because, as a tool, Submithub is extremely efficient and effective for getting someone *who the submitter chooses themselves* to actually press play on their music submission and then communicate a decision (something that rarely happens with email submissions for most artists these days). Whether you see any value in a using a tool that offers a service like that, that is up to you.
Whatever happens outside of the facilitated submission process (ie. whether you get accepted or not or whether you feel the exposure received moved the needle in the way you imagined in your head), that falls outside the realm of what ‘Submithub - the submission facilitation tool’ can be responsible for — those are separate conversations that often have more to do with how good someone is at managing expectations they set themselves vs reality.
IMPORTANT THING #2:
The act of actually dealing with music submissions as a music blog/curator—and by that I just mean the act of listening long enough to EVERYTHING that you are sent & making decisions as to whether you like it enough to want to share it on whatever platform you have built over the years that people have chose to submit their music to, and then communicating that decision with EVERY submitter, whether it be a ‘yah’ or a ‘nah’—actually doing that stuff, on an ongoing consistent basis, is a job in and of itself.
And some people like to say, “how is listening to music that a stranger sends you for a minute and a half count as ‘work’?”, but those people aren’t doing the math of what that looks like multiplied by the 1000s every month, forever. I guess because it’s easier to shit on the existence of Submithub if you refuse to acknowledge the reason it exists.
Submithub is mainly considered “controversial” because a large chunk of people don’t want to acknowledge the fact that the person sending the music and asking somebody else to ‘just listen & let me know what you think’, that person is literally asking someone else to do some work for them. And I’m not talking about the work that goes into sharing a track if it gets approved, whether that be writing blog posts or just sharing in playlists or on social media—Submithub only facilitates the submission process, although it often gets wrongly lumped in with people that try to charge money for writing a post or for guaranteed playlist placements, which are ‘actual payola’ things that will get you kicked off of Submithub—I’m only talking about the never ending micro-task that is dealing with all the “hey… plz check this out” requests.
That stuff adds up fast and never stops, to the point where most music bloggers just stop answering unfamiliar emails altogether until eventually burning out and packing it in — and then all we’ll be left with is the big name publications who only open messages from artists that are represented by paid PR people who they already have established relationships with (which, ironically, is the other thing that small artists/labels often complain about when they’re not complaining about how Submithub has taken away the ‘free bulk pr’ alternative option that a lot of small blogs often get thought of as).
So it is not completely crazy that a submission tool has been built around the idea of acknowledging that dealing with submissions is actual work + the people who get asked to deal with those submissions are being asked to do that work by the people sending the submissions (ie. it’s not like I go around listening to people’s music unsolicited, telling them I don’t like it enough to share it, and then send them an invoice for my time). I promise you, no blog is sending themselves submissions.
Now, with those 2 Important Things in mind, I’d like to talk about how I use Submithub as a tool for dealing with all the music submissions people choose to send to me and my blahg.
Because I think there is a more rational conversation to be had about Submithub, and music submissions / music blogs in general, but we’re never going to get there if people keep sticking their fingers in their ears and going, “IT’S A SCAM! IT’S A SCAM! IT’S A SCAM!” — and one of my biggest frustrations with the overall dialogue around Submithub is I feel that I use the service in a perfectly fair and reasonable way, and I’m not the only one, but whenever I try to point that out as an example of how Submithub can be used, a certain type of person refuses to acknowledge any of the points that work against their argument that the site, and anyone who uses it, including me, are cancers of the music industry. And that kind of thinking is toxic and bs.
So, first, let’s start off with the options that people have if they want to directly send me a music submission for consideration. Those options are:
#1 - They can choose to pay for a Premium Submithub submission (Premium credits cost $1 or less, depending on how many credits they buy, of which I receive 50¢ for meeting the criteria of having to deal with + respond to the submission within 48 hours — if I like the song enough to share it on my platform, I have to communicate how and when I will share, a chat is opened up with the submitter, and I do not receive the 50¢ until after I’ve shared the track; if I decline, I have to communicate some brief feedback on why I didn’t like the track enough to want to share it. I get paid the same 50¢ for an approval or a decline, therefore there is no incentive to accept paid submissions and it is not “payola” — a submitter is simply choosing to pay for guaranteed consideration and a communicated decision within a certain amount of time, much like how people can choose to pay others for their time in any other field that seems to exist without controversy).
Or…
#2 - They can choose to send me a FREE Standard Submithub submission (Standard submissions don’t come with a 48 hour deadline and submitters are limited to how many Standard submissions they can send in a day + I don’t have to explain why I decline a track, the submitter is just notified that the track was declined, which is still better than being left wondering about an ignored email. I listen to everything I am sent and all approvals are based on whether a track resonates with my headphones, it doesn’t matter which kind of submission it is).
Or…
#3- There is a third, often forgot about option, and that is a person can choose to not send me anything at all (for example, instead of waiting until after I decline a track to go “who asked for your talentless opinion anyways?!” it is totally possible to just not ask for my talentless opinion in the first place. I also look for and discover music in my own ways and in my own time when I am not dealing with the the music submissions that have been directly sent for me to deal with).
I have no control over who decides they want to send me their music or whether they decide they would rather send me a Premium submission over a Standard submission (or what their reasoning is for making those decisions). All I have control over is deciding to use a tool that makes it realistic for me to actually manage all the submissions I get sent on an ongoing basis + I can control the parameters for how and when it makes sense for me to deal with this time-consuming part of having a website that tries to turn other people on to other people’s music — which, it should be pointed out, is not the only thing in life that I need to spend time on (which is why I only accept submissions every second ‘Sunday to Wednesday’ stretch because, despite the false rumours that blogs use Submithub as a cash cow to get rich milking artists for doing nothing, the amount of work that goes into dealing with submissions, even when some have a 50¢ incentive attached to them, doesn’t even work out to be what one could earn with a part-time minimum wage job + there is so much more to keeping a music blog going then just dealing with music submissions).
But, and I can’t state this enough, when it comes to someone deciding whether or not to send me their music, that is a decision that they make on their own — and all the information about my site’s approval % and audience reach and a bunch of other real-time stats & links is clearly communicated up-front to help them decide whether I’d even be worth using a Premium credit / or one of their free Standard submissions on.
Believe it or not, some people decide to send me music because they actually appreciate what my little one-person music blog does and the time & energy I have put into keeping it going all these years.
Of course, a lot of people just spray their submissions at anyone they can find in their genres and don’t care who shares their music as long as their music gets shared by someone. That’s fine too, I don’t expect people to care about or check out every site in detail before sending their music (it’s a good idea if you want better results, but it also takes more time). At the end of the day, all I can do on my end is just press play on everything people have chose to send me on Submithub and only accept those tracks that resonate with my headphones on that “I like this enough to want to go tell someone else about it” level, whether they be Premium or Standard submissions, whether they be from people I have prior interactions with or not.
And then I go over to my conveniently organized ‘Approved’ section on Submithub and share the tracks that are ready to be shared in the ways that I share music online.
That’s it.
That’s the whole scandalous process that continues to get so many people worked up online, furiously trying to convince themselves and others that it all must be unethical, somehow.
So where is the scam?
As crazy as it sounds to the Submithub conspiracy theorists out there, some artists/labels/pr realize that the amount of time that they put into sending out unanswered bulk emails is a lost cost in itself, so submitting their music with a tool that will actually get someone to press play and communicate back an actual decision—whether that be by paying a small fee for a guaranteed listen/decision within 48 hours OR choosing to possibly wait a bit longer with the free option that still gets their track in the queue of a curator’s easy-to-listen-and-deal-with music submission player, even if the decision ends up being a ‘no’—that’s a considered choice that people knowingly choose.
And it’s also a considered choice that some people knowingly don’t choose.
The point is that THEY choose.
And, in a way, that seems to be the main thing that people get so upset about when it comes to Submithub: other people continue to choose to use it — despite all their bitter Twitter claims that say the site is a fraud and all who use it are a bunch of suckers/scammers.
What’s even worse is that some people seem to think that Submithub is actually a pretty fair & effective tool for promoting music these days, especially when compared to the time that goes into dead-end emails and dms. And even worst of all, some people don’t actually think of music blogs/curators as useless hacks that should just be thankful they even get to share somebody else’s music for free, they actually think these independent sharers of music are an important part of creating a healthy music scene that reaches out further than their own online bubbles can AND some of those people don’t even think it is a bad thing that music blogs/curators can now earn a bit of income for some of the work they do (in fact, some people don’t even blame music blogs/curators for the fact that it is almost impossible to make a living as an artist and realize that the solution to one side’s work being devalued is not to just devalue the work of someone else).
Now, I’m not saying that Submithub is a perfect site and that there aren’t parts of the service that don’t appeal to me either — but it’s not my place to have rigid opinions on sections like ‘Hot or Not’ that I don’t use or for me to be vocally against people submitting music to “Influencers” for TikTok consideration just because I’m not a part of that world and don’t understand it. If people find value and choose to use those parts of the site, I don’t see where the problem is. All I can do is use Submithub in a way that makes sense for my blog and whether or not people want to continue to submit music for my consideration, that’s out of my hands.
So how about we please bury these tired “Submithub is a scam” arguments that people keep fishing for easy likes with and move the conversation on towards something more productive?
For example, how about we talk about how to make music streaming better? Or how to better engage regular people (ie. people outside the online music echo chamber) into better supporting artists? Or maybe we could just start with not trying to shit on what others do just because we feel frustrated about our own situation, painting a bunch of other people with a broad brush based on isolated experiences and false assumptions, and then we’ll take things from there?
Heck, we could even talk about how to try and make a tool like Submithub better, if only we could just get past the hurdle of getting more people to be ok with the idea of recognizing the time of the humans they send their music to as being worthy of having some value. And I say that as a dude that also accepts & listens to the free Standard submissions — that’s how broken & unsustainable the old ‘bulk email’ process was/is.
But, I’m just starting to repeat myself—which is one of the challenges of trying to talk about something like Submithub, where people ignore points in order to make the same arguments over & over again—so I’ll shut up now and you can feel free to let me know your thoughts in the comments section below.
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UPDATE: after tweeting about this post I got badgered by two anti-Submithub’rs with a blackbelt in avoiding points + asking questions / making accusations that were dealt with in the above blog post they claimed to have read. It’s been an annoying distraction to say the least. The one bright side of them refusing to go away is I eventually came up with 3 simple questions that I think, if answered truthfully, should be able to walk most people to where a big part of my point is (the questions even seemed to put a stop to the online badgering — but that was just a temporary break, probably more related to time zone differences than gained insight, as I guess some people especially struggle with what the reality of the answer to question number 3 would require of them, so the two returned with their same “DEBATE ME!” energy the next day).
But I figured I’d throw the 3 questions down here just in case someone has made it all the way through this blog post and also feels a burning rage about the fact that other people decide for themselves to send me music submissions or that dealing with music submissions could ever be considered work, as I still feel like the logic is sound if one is open to logic:
And… NOW I will shut up and you can let me know your thoughts in the comments section below if you fancy \m/
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