 What's up? What's up, everybody? It's brand man, Sean, and I'm here today with a special guest, Jason Grishkoff. Got it right that time. And man, if you don't know him, he is the founder of Submit Hub, one of the staple names in music. When it comes to getting your music connected through curators and other forms of placements, there's so many forms, which I actually want to get into this in this interview. But if you want to get your music heard and shared online, this is one of the key sites. And they have a really unique model that goes a lot against a lot of things we talk about, not against in terms of don't do it, but it's just a complete differently alternative than things we even touch on usually. So I really want to use not this space just to learn about Submit Hub, but how artists should get their music heard when they go the route of curators, when they go the route of blog placements today. How do we know what a relevant blog looks like today? All these types of things. So without further ado, I appreciate you, Jason, for being on. And if you will, if you will, can you just give us a very, very quick snippet on what was your background and made you start Submit Hub and then I want to get right into the things that I know is going to give them immediate value. Okay, cool. Thank you for the intro. Pleasure to be here. I'll give you the quick skinny. So I started music blogging back in 2007-2008. Music blogs were it. It was the way to go. SoundCloud didn't exist. Spotify didn't exist. YouTube music wasn't a thing. Music blogs were where you went to download your illegal MP3s, build up your library, get your Winamp playlist going and looking strong. So it was a good time to be in that music discovery space. And I started a blog called Indie Shuffle, which is still alive and running today, 15 years later. The landscape changed a lot in that time. But one of the things that happened was that music blogs collectively became king and queen makers in the industry. So if you were an artist and you managed to get picked up by 10 of the bigger blogs, and next thing you know your track was charting on this website called Hype Machine. I'm not sure if you're familiar with it, but Hype Machine was this website that kept track of all the blogs. It would tell you who was blogging about what, how many people were doing it. And every single major label and industry professional was using Hype Machine as their ANR discovery tool. So what people quickly figured out was that if you wanted good PR coverage and you wanted to blow up, you needed to get the blogs to write about your music. In the early days that was doable. When I started my blog Indie Shuffle, I was stoked to receive new emails from artists. I was like, oh, sick. This is cool, you know, I'm out here looking for music, but you're actually pitching me. And I found some cool stuff that way, but over the years that strategy became more well known and there were these spreadsheets traveling around with like, here's a list of 500 emails and it was untargeted. It was a mess, man. So by the time 2014 rolled around, I was getting 300 plus emails a day in my inbox. It was like, here's a Dropbox, here's a SoundCloud link, here's a Spotify link, here's a YouTube video of me playing in my bedroom. It was just all over the place. And the thing going through my head was that there had to be a better way to manage all of that for my own blog. So I took some of the coding chops that I had picked up, building and growing Indie Shuffle. I built a really simple form that people could fill out. Artist name, song title, give me a link and then I used my code to make sure everything was in this consistent feed that looked a lot like your SoundCloud feed. And next to each song I had a thumb up button and a thumb down button. And then I put it up, you got an email and said, hey, Jason from Indie Shuffle lacks your song, he's going to blog it. Thumb down. You got an email saying, hey, he's listened to your song. Unfortunately, he's not going to cover it. So overnight Submit Hub was a bit of a game changer. 20 music blogs were signed up within the first week. So these were people I was peers with networked with and new. And so when I pitched this tool to them, it was a bit of a no brainer. Like, yeah, please save me from my inbox. It's crazy. And then from an artist's perspective, this was actually one of the first times you could guarantee that your music was getting listened to. You didn't have to pay $2,000 a month for a publicist to do it. And your emails, like they were just getting ignored at that time, right? Sending out 500 emails. Good luck getting any response except for people being like, yo, $20 for a placement. Paola existed back then. It exists in different forms now. But so yeah, Submit Hub was born at the end of 2015 and the idea was to help curators manage that flow of submissions and to enable artists to actually be able to make those connections again. So it's grown since then this month we should be hitting our 30 millionth submission. That's a bunch. Yeah, we're approaching 1 million artists. There are close to 3000 active curators, playlists, etc. And so yeah, it's been it's been a seven year journey from our side. And I think at this point you can, the core product of Submit Hub is to approach it as a smart directory. It's like those old spreadsheets, but way better. We are essentially curating the list of curators and making sure that you are contacting people who you can trust and that you have all the information about them prior to sending to it. So we'll make sure that if you're making a hip hop song, you're going to be targeting people who like hip hop and we'll tell you how many listeners they have on their playlist, no one else has that we've got that we'll give it to you. We'll tell you how often they share where they share how long they share it's just like, it's, it's a directory on steroids man. So, yeah that's Submit Hub in a nutshell, and there's a whole bunch of peripheral things we do but that's got you got you. So I appreciate that explanation. You immediately make me think about those numbers you said approaching a million artists. Right. I saw was somewhere around 800,000 and then 3000 curators which is a lot of curators, but man that ratio, right of artists to curators is massive. And of course you get to that problem of man there's so many artists that are submitting and I can only get to so many like that problem you you experienced, but even with that. At that moment, I'm at the current moment. How exactly are you helping the curators manage that then I want to ask something for the artist as well. So from the curator standpoint, most of them are getting between 10 to 100 submissions per day. And the carrot that keeps them going are these premium credits. So each curator asks for either one two or three premium credits, and you can buy these premium credits for anywhere between 60 cents to a dollar each, depending on how many are buying whether you're applying coupons there's lots of coupons floating around. So, when you're pitching your song to them, you're dangling this money in front of them. And the idea is that they can earn that money if they respond within 48 hours, listen for at least 20 seconds and give you 10 plus words of feedback. If they check off those three boxes, they're entitled to those credits and that's their earnings so from the curator side we're not only solving the problem of their inbox is being overflowing and managing these submissions, we're helping them ensure that the submissions are targeted and they're earning a little bit of money I'd say most of them are earning between 100 to $300 a month through it so it's not big money but it's enough to reinvest in ads to help grow their playlist stuff like that. There are definitely some bigger names, earning $3,000 $4,000 $5,000 a month, handling their submissions through submit hub. So that from the curator side is one of the primary benefits but also if you're on there. It helps with your reputation and your name brand. So you're getting out there if you're listed on submit hub, you're going to be hit up by every other submit hub competitor trying to sign you up. And it just it means that you've gone through our quality review process so there is some some like genuine stuff going on there. And then we also give each of the curators a lot of tools so they can, like when they find a song they like they can schedule it to be automatically added to their playlist on this date, and they can schedule a removal for this date they can rearrange their playlists they get insights to a whole bunch of stats that we have that they can't get like the average listener's number. That's not a Spotify number that's our number. So number of their average magic. No it's pretty straightforward. As an artist you have access to the Spotify for artists dashboard and you can see what your individual playlists got you. So what we do is about three weeks after an artist has been added to a playlist. We reach out to them and we pay them to send us their Spotify for artists insights. On that we're able to determine how many listeners they got from each playlist and usually what happens is, you know an artist will get on five or six playlists so when they send us that data we get five or six relevant data points for the playlisters on our site. And then we also have a deal with one of the major labels as well as one of the major distributors. And they give us some of their insights as well because they I mean they have they have all the Spotify for artists data for all of their artists right so we can actually say, you know here's a random playlist. Can you tell me if any of your artists are in here and how many listeners they're getting from it. So, we were able to get that data and then we show it publicly like anyone can see it that that's, you don't even have to have an account you can just go on to submit your playlist or is averaging in terms of listeners. Yeah I saw some of that. And I like that about the site, right just that that tease that I could just engage without logging in at all of course the value still there. Right then, in some ways that prevents people from having to do to be like a wasteful login create a login just to see it and they don't want to use the site so I'm sure there's a bit. Yeah, I hate that stuff man when you have to when when you have to log in to even see what a website is doing. I hate it. So, yeah, everything is there publicly visible for you to see upfront without an account and that has obvious benefits and So I've alluded to this earlier but there are competitors who just come in and take that data from us and use that to bolster their own stats, as well as to find all the playlists. So if you, as I mentioned if you get signed up as a playlist on submit hub it's a matter of days until a bunch of the other guys start reaching out to you being like hey, have you joined our play listing network. So great sign though man I had a festival. That was how I first kind of got started in the entertainment music space and what I learned, we had built up so much cloud that when new locations open and people would use our event basically to bring in business from other places. They would be like man as soon as y'all announced your flyer, we got so many inquiries to use this space, right because people are watching us like that so it sounds like you guys have a little of that leader impact as well. Yeah, but look I don't let my God down. I think it's important for me to keep a track of what everyone else is doing as well right so I watched your interview with Harry from daily playlist just to see what those guys are up to lessons they're doing and the ways that they're trying to help artists. Those are important things for me to keep an eye on. Otherwise I'm just going to get sort of lazy and people are going to catch up. So it's important to me that we keep moving forward so there's a lot of new features everyone says that right lots of new features. At the end of the day, the more value we can deliver to artists, the more they'll come back and use submit up. And that's, that's a difficult thing to accomplish in this space as you know right like not everyone can get the value they're looking for. But we're trying. We're trying. So with that being said, if you can just simplify it for me as an artist. How do I know your curators are vetted right I know you say they're vetted. I guess I can only trust but technically, what is your process for vetted curators that's a better way of saying it. Yeah, yeah, no that's a good question. So for a curator to join submit how they have to go through an application review process, about 20% of the applicants get approved. So 80% of them get rejected and I can give you insight into some of the things that we're looking at. One of the first ones we look at is their historical Spotify growth chart, like we're speaking about Spotify specifically because I think that's the, the most relevant one that people are interested in but we look at their growth to see if there's been any unexplainable spikes in their followers. So the way you'll typically identify this is, you know, we have a lot of this data on our side but for the for normal artists, you could go do a platform like chart metric or spot on track. Both of these are websites that that keep track of playlists, and they'll show you the daily Spotify growth. So one of the things to look for in those spikes because they're not always cut and dry is a sudden overnight spike with nothing after that. And I'll tell you why it's not cut and dry because you've done a lot of this yourself influence and marketing, right. It has a short time span, especially if you're doing Instagram stories. So we often see playlists who have a background in influencer marketing and so they grow their playlist that way and they keep it engaged. So you'll see what those spikes is a pretty quick overnight growth, but then another 24 to 48 hours of slow, like additional growth as well. So growth of followers is something we look at but it's not always straightforward like there's a guy who is driving me nuts three days ago. He uploaded a video to YouTube about submit her being a scam and his proof was this playlist or he's like guaranteed scam look he grew by 1000 followers in a day. I, on my side, noticed that within five minutes of happening reached out to the playlist and he actually sent us a bunch of proof he's like oh no here's the story you can go check it out right now. I'll get the stats when it's done. Here's the invoice I paid to the influencer and you can like see all of this there so moral of the story is that looking at followers is a nice beginning, but it's not like the thing so we got to look at more Here's another huge red flag. You guys were talking about a website called playlist supply at one point so it's possible you've seen this as well but what playlist supply does is they scan all of the playlists on Spotify for Instagram handles or Gmail addresses. It's actually really easy you can even do it yourself if you go search in Spotify for like wrap and Gmail calm it'll show you a bunch of playlists that have a Gmail address for us. That's a pretty big red flag. Usually when someone's listing their Instagram or their Gmail. They're trying to hustle for money. They want you to pay them so as soon as you reach out and you'll find this on playlist supply as soon as you reach out to them 90% plus are going to either ask for some sort of playlist exchange, which is. Okay, that's not a violation of Spotify's terms that I'm aware of, but, but the majority of them want money right they're going to make $20 for position number three. Huge red flag violate Spotify's policy and we typically find that the people who are willing to charge for placement like that are also the ones who are happy to go out and buy fake followers and bots right they're not in it because they love music. They're going to make money, and they're going to screw you over algorithmically because they're just putting songs and their playlist of anyone who's willing to pay so the quality is typically lower. She means the skip rates are high, and the genre matching is, is often non existence like, like, so you got a rap song you'll be right next to a country song and an EDM song it is bad news for Spotify's algorithm. Well, you're saying that all of you guys is create curators are doing it just for the love of curation. They are making money on submit hub, but not a single one of them can be bribed with payola to get placement. How do we how do we know curating a playlist takes time right right yeah. And because of that yes I'm making my 100 to $300 I know you said there's some who are making more but that's not a lot of money right and then I'm sure there's making money from other sites as well but overall it's probably not substantial through that method right the company's your name right, including yourself. So, are you finding most of these people who are not scammers right or who are not going to charge you. Even if they deliver on the problems I'm not going to put them in a scammer category they're just doing something that's in the gray. But it's not great it's it's clearly against Spotify. People say we're in the gray right pay for consideration is gray. Here's here's my okay. I can write in terms of Spotify's terms right, and all the galleries. I mean gray in terms of what you promise your customer. Right. So it's like the macro, you know, institutional versus. I told you I'm going to do it so I at least delivered on my promise to you right. But so I'm saying the people who aren't those though right who aren't charging for a playlist who aren't doing by so anything like that. What are they doing it for. Do you do you find they're building some type of brand somehow and monetizing some other way are these strictly just kids for the most part who just have extra time on their hands and are having fun. What's going on here what's the incentive to be a curator. It's a good question and there are a few different answers to it. I think much like musicians. There are many different reasons that people make music some do it because they love making music and they are never planning on being big and there are others who hustle because they want to get big. On the playlist or side, you got a lot of them who are just doing it because they love finding music and they love being recognized for that. Right. These guys are 99% doing it as a hobby. The money isn't the driver here necessarily it's a nice little pocket change but they will got day jobs right curation doesn't take eight hours a day. These guys are spending one maybe two hours when they get home instead of, you know, like you, people need something to do on the internet right and you get hooked on things some people get hooked on scrolling through Instagram. They get hooked on making really cool informational videos for their YouTube channel and play listers are hooked on that process of sitting down listening to music and discovering it. You've also got some who are running labels. So they're using their playlist as a way to sort of big up their own artists as well as their brand. Right. You've got some who are part of much larger things. You've got really larger blogs like stereo Fox earmilk. Burp FM, Alex rainbowed a lot of these YouTube channels that are also labels this that that so they these are the few who are doing it full time. And generally though I think an important thing to understand with most of these playlist curators is that they are hobbyists in the same way that many artists are also hobbyists they're not doing it because they want to make a living from it they're doing it because this is their creative outlet that they love working in. So, yeah, it's not a get rich quick thing. And we definitely don't want to work with the people who are hustling these payments because in my mind, they're, they're doing it for the wrong reason. They're doing it because money is is there, and the quality of their playlists often suffers as a result and that has a direct bearing on your potential to perform well on Spotify. So, yeah, I mean we've got we've got 1500 Spotify playlists on on submit hub. They're not all perfect right some of them are definitely there because they're trying to make money, especially if they're in a developing nation like Turkey or South America right a dollar there goes a lot further than a dollar in the states. But, but a lot of the guys especially the Americans, the Europeans where a dollar doesn't go that far, they're doing it because they, they love it. So yeah, you'll find everything on there but by and large that's, that's where people are they're doing it because they, they have a passion for it the same way artists like making music. I would love to hear your clear take, by the way, on the payola concept, more so in terms of not the legality of it but I don't even know if I want to say ethics but just doesn't make sense do you have a problem with it because outside of Spotify said it's illegal but I don't know if hey I paid to put you on my platform. Right, and then I play your music do you have an issue with that. I come from an, I call myself an old school blogger in a way. So back in the, in the 2005 to 2015 span music blogging was all about your your credibility. We're discovering new artists and sharing them and many of us were able to make our revenue from advertising back then advertising on the internet was accessible to anyone. It wasn't just dominated by Facebook and Google right blogs are making money knitting blogs, cooking blogs, music blogs, whatever we were all making money. And that was that transition from magazine advertising to digital advertising and with that came this ethos that the, our job as music taste makers was to be doing it for the integrity of it. We wanted to find the artists no one's ever heard of because you get clout. If that artist blows up and you can be like, that was me I found them first right. But when when in reality it never was like that cut and dry, but still there were definitely blogs who would take credit for discovering artists who ended up blowing up. And so yeah, personally, I think that as soon as there's guaranteed payment without disclosure, you are compromising your integrity as a curator, and you're also in a sense, fooling yourself as an artist because you're not getting a genuine you're not, you're rarely finding someone who's genuinely passionate about your music. They're sharing it because you paid them. There's an entire platform built around this now and muso soup. It is literally, you put your song up and the bloggers come along and they offer you placement they're like hey I love your song $30 and I'll write about it. If you don't pay me I won't share it. It's so it's like straight up payola and personally, I've taken a very hard line on it. I'm not a big fan of it. I'm coming from a different background there. I do. And I think I think where it becomes okay is when there's disclosure that is an editorial on the publisher on the publisher side. And I don't even I don't even need that to be like this, you know, I don't want to have a big orange banner that's like this artist paid me $12 50 through PayPal and here's there. Like, just say, you know this this article was published as part of a promotional campaign for so and so is new song. It's a subtle way to do it. But in my mind what you're doing there is you are you're disclosing ethically that there's been money exchange for the promotion of that content. So yeah, I'm, I'm a bit of an old school, like hardcore payola is bad and at the end of the day you're only fooling yourself right you're paying money to people who are. I just don't think it's going to lead to genuine fan relationships. The way I see it is it's happening all around us regardless. So if I'm a, if I have somebody a friend that's a curator, and they've spent all this time to build a platform. Everywhere else, people are charging for real estate right. So you're borrowing my real estate. So I think you have the ability to charge for whatever you put on your site. That part makes sense to me. So somebody just wants to advertise cool music is technically advertise of course that great spaces like you said is if I'm presenting myself as a curator, I should like like it right. Like I'm presenting something as I'm choosing because I'm putting it here because I genuinely like that. But I think that right there. I can have both and I say this because of my experience on tick tock and I haven't seen this anywhere like this until tick tock came where at scale I see more and more and more not curators, just creators who are unwilling to post music that they don't actually Right. And I think that's good. That's good works in multiple directions one because the post probably won't perform as well. They're not going to have like, because it's just like people aren't going to listen to bad music. The idea doesn't come as cleanly. I remember I can't remember her name right now. But it was like we had one young lady who was very hard on. Hey, I don't like that song. Oh, I love this artist. And there was a sheer difference and she will come up with all these great ideas. But of course, she had her platform and she had a manager so she would still have to get paid to do an influencer post. So, to me, a placement on outside of Spotify saying it's illegal a placement is a placement. That's kind of how I look at it. I'm not and I'm not big in this space I'm not dealing with curators and we kind of just stay away from it because of the a lot of the bodies and all that kind of stuff but the I think the most important thing is the curator actually genuinely likes the song and it's in their best interest anyway you like this song and it's for your audience. And I think the thing is to actually stay disciplined to that though obviously because of the money and that's where the bigger issues start to come out you end up, you know, exploiting yourself to irrelevance like most platforms do. Yeah, look, I've got a double standard here as well. And on our influencer side of submit hub so you can submit to tick tock and Instagram influencers. It's payola you're paying for placement they're not even really disclosing that it's paid for placement. It is straight up payola and for me, the difference in my head is that I don't consider those influencers to be curators. They are creators on an influencer platform. And with rare exception, they are not actually considered music curators like people don't go to them because of their music they go to them because they love watching their lives unfold and it's like a little reality TV or they make entertaining content or whatever. A lot of our playlists are curators, they're curators and that's like to me there's a responsibility there to try 100,000 new songs a day right someone's got to sift through it and try to filter out the stuff that actually is worth listening to. And that's my old school piece coming through where I'm like no this is where we got to hold ourselves to a higher esteem and do it so look at sometimes I feel like I'm having a losing battle here but on submit hub you won't find curators who take money and as part of that application process which is what triggered this whole tangent in conversation. One of the things that we're looking for our playlists is who are trying to build focused genuine playlists and are not opening themselves up to guaranteed placements. So you guys don't really use what we call them tick tock curators because there are people who, you know, top three songs. Yeah, for sure. Like there are those people that let's call them the son and daughters we actually put them on the curator side. So they they're not doing the pay all the thing and so the way submit hub works is that you get these songs as a curator. You get paid regardless of whether you say yes or no, you don't get paid extra for saying yes, it's the same amount of money for every single song regardless of your decision. And the average approval rate on the website is about 20% but that obviously means some artists come on submit hub and end up walking away like batting zero for 100. And you've got some some more focused experienced people who, well for starters they don't send to 100 people but they sent to about 20 or 30 and they'll walk away with a 50% approval rate. So, yeah, we'll put those tick tock guys the ones who who, like this is almost the new breed of bloggers right they are in a way that that up and coming. They're pretty young, and the format is interesting and cool and some of them are quite influential but we would rather have them on the curator side than on the influencer side we don't want to, we don't want to be given them fixed payments for that type of stuff. Got you. That makes sense. So what's the strategy that you recommend artists for how they approach play listers. Okay, cool so still on the subject of playlists, because we can we also do blogs and YouTube and all that but we're definitely going to get into that and I don't actually mean like how do you find a quality one or anything like that. But so we're going to assume all of them are overall strategy. Right yeah like how should I use them on maybe as a part of my rollout or when I should start using them. Do I, how many should I, I work with like what are your thoughts on that. Yeah, well look anyone who's watched your episodes understands that that marketing is a multi pronged approach right and play listing is just one of them. What I have observed these days is that one of the more effective techniques from the play listing side is to think about it as if you are teaching Spotify where to place your songs. So you can leverage these independent playlists to give Spotify clues about what they should associate your music with. So you're kind of shaping that similar artists, what does it call it fans also like section on Spotify. The logic here is that the real meat and potatoes of Spotify is in their algorithmic stuff and their editorial playlists are even shifting more and more algorithmic as well right they're looking for signals they're looking for clues as to what should be put into that. So you can use independent playlists to teach Spotify where they should place your song and what that means is that if you make like a super niche, like Celtic music, right, super niche, what you really want to do. Don't go out there and try to get 100 playlists try find five that literally do Celtic music that's it. And they, those playlists need to be full of all the artists that you think you should be associated with. What's going to happen is Spotify is going to see that people are listening to your songs alongside these songs, and they're going to start clumping them together. And what you want to do is try send a consistent and cohesive signal to Spotify. The worst thing you could do is get put into one of these fake New Music Friday playlists, like one dead giveaway here is often just a really generic name of a playlist. But like today's top hits, you'll see that everywhere. Bad idea because a doesn't have any hits in it, it's just a bunch of people who paid for placement and be like they're not going to have Celtic music right so now your song is in there and Spotify's gone wait a second we thought there was Celtic but they're next to an EDM song or whatever. So if you can use these playlists to to sort of train Spotify, and it's not a one old thing it's a slow and steady with each song. What that means is that by your fourth or fifth or sixth song. When you release it Spotify already knows, Oh, these guys make Celtic music, like let's clump this with a bunch of other banjo playing. I'm going to get in trouble because it's not a banjo. You know what Celtic music is right but so Spotify now knows where to place your song. And what that means is that these release radar playlists these algorithmic things that come up to make these recommendations or, or also another powerful one is what Spotify plays next. So someone listens to an album Spotify by default enables auto play. I've disabled it I hate it. Like I listened to an album I want to listen to that album. And when it ends I'm going to be like, that was it. It's done. Well, they they automatically play other songs right they're trying to mint that money they want to keep people listening and doing this stuff so you kind of want to teach them that your song should be the next one to show up. So these are the types of things that you can use their independent playlist to to to leverage for and in that mentality. It's almost like there's, there's no one too small, right. In the Celtic playlist they're not going to have a big audience it's such a niche tiny genre, but getting five of those listeners if they're all focused on the same stuff. You can actually start to push Spotify in the direction of knowing where to place your music. So in my mind I think that's one of the more like the market is super saturated today right and if you're an artist coming into Spotify hoping to get your one to one ratio on your payback, or thousands of listeners overnight. The reality is that's not going to happen, because everyone else is trying to do the same thing as well and tools like submit hub and daily playlist and all that we've made it accessible for the average DIY artist to go out and push their song. So I think one of the more hands on better strategies you can use is to target very specific playlist that align very well with the artist that you want to see yourself featured alongside. I love that man I love that because I mean there's even some playlists like the top tick tock songs and things like that that are actually legitimate right but they're still not specific right because tick tock is almost like its own culture where you can have things that aren't the same genre but still be relevant. But by that theory that you just stated me getting on place on that legitimate playlist which a lot of times they make it hard because you're not a hit on there but like me trying to get on that it would actually serve me wrong in terms of training the algorithm. Right. And I think that switches the mentality that people are approaching playlist with because now I'm not looking for a quick hit. Like when you learn that oh well all these playlists where you see these huge numbers and in terms of growth. Most of those are fake right because even editorial Spotify editorial playlists. Most of them are not going to give you these massive shifts then it becomes well what's the value of it. A lot of artists actually become pretty discouraged. But if you approach it more from that perspective is like oh the value is I'm training the algorithm I'm not trying to get out the gate that becomes that's so great because the last thing I'll say on that is it goes right along a strategy we use what we call the coverage strategy for lack of better words any channel any outlet it could be an Instagram page it could be a tick tock influencer it could be a playlist but we first really really leaning heavily with when we were looking at playlist is when you find those few quality playlists right. And a lot of times because they genuinely do love music we've had people like that now they're open they're ready like oh man I love your music you shoot him another song they're excited to see another song from from this artist. And then you keep getting your place in that same playlist right their audience obviously will be similar so they'll see more than once, but I never really considered the algorithmic specificity that that comes with so. Man, I really love you sharing that gym and we're going to give this a title for this segment of that piece of just for that segment. Yeah yeah yeah we're going to get you a couple, you know 5000. I was having a chat with Ari her stand I don't know if you know me does Ari's take also like these informational things for indie artists. And he, he was talking about a playlist push campaign that he did many years ago. And he was super stoked. So he had done a submit a campaign and he got a few approvals but didn't move the needle a lot. And then he went and did this playlist push campaign and within a day he picked up 10,000 streams and he was stoked. Like this is massive. This is great. And then a week later he found that all of his similar artists which he had been sort of working on for ages were completely wrong. It was artists that should not be aligned with his stuff is all. And so that was, it's that double edged so that you mentioned where you like stoked that you're getting a bunch of streams but actually you might be hurting yourself a little bit. And then Ari also pointed out an interesting observation which I think straightforward to explain but getting into these editorial playlist on Spotify, big overnight numbers right, but terrible save and skip ratios. And often a little bit jumbled on their genres but the save and the skip ratios are apparently a very important thing to Spotify in terms of determining whether a song is good or not. And, and the, the reason I think here is because Spotify is trying to shove these editorial playlist down everyone's throat. And, and so it's just the common people listening to these playlists which is a good thing in a way, but most of them are putting this playlist on in the background hitting shuffle and ignoring it. The bad save to skip ratio it doesn't look good for you, whereas these independent playlists, they're hustling to get their listeners, they got to do Instagram advertising and they got to do like they're doing all sorts of stuff to try and keep their playlists engaged. And often what that means is that they are targeting people who are actively looking for new music and engaging with it and so they're far more likely to actually be sitting there with your playlist, like, listening to songs like I like that favorite like that. So, yeah, it's this double edged sword because ultimately you're trying to teach Spotify so well that they chuck you in all their editorial playlist and then like, maybe you're going to take a step back I don't know. The algorithm is not public we don't know exactly what's going to happen but yeah, I think it's an interesting train of thought and so we're on submit have we're trying to create more awareness and transparency around how specific playlists are so we can actually one someone. Don't bother submitting to this playlist it's going to model your formula and actually we go step further and if we see that from someone who's applying they're probably not going to get on submit up because they're not helping. Gotcha. Gotcha. All right great well let's transition to blogs because you know obviously that's something we haven't really got to touch on too heavily. What is that landscape look like today I saw one thing well actually I'll see if you said because I don't want to put words in your mouth but Okay, okay. I want to say what do you find relevant blogs today and why because it isn't even worth using blogs today. Yeah but not for the reasons you think it is. So if you go into it trying to find blogs that are going to expose you to a big audience, you're probably blocking up the wrong tree. Even the big big big boys, they've lost all their audience myself included right I used to do on any shuffle six million plus listeners a month was massive. Our peak was in about 2014 today we're doing about 400,000 a month and that makes us probably top 10 biggest music blogs in the world. Viewers is unique unique listeners. Listen, you actually have a some type of play playlist that people can check out. So well Indie shuffle is a music blog but it before SoundCloud and Spotify and all these existed we were one of the first websites that allowed you to navigate around while you listen to a song. It was like revolutionary stuff at the time, which we take for granted today, but yeah you could go from page to page keep listening to songs and we also lined up by their songs for you. So a lot of people used to use Indie shuffle as their Spotify playlists before Spotify playlist existed right. So yeah, we're, we're a bit of a streaming platform. It's a little bit different and that is actually how any shuffle managed to get as big as it did, because we weren't just like a blog. We were a streaming platform. Anyway, that's a digression play music blogs today don't have very engaged audiences. There are rare exceptions that might, but in general they don't and they also don't have the industry audiences that they necessarily used to have. So back in the day blogs were where a and our people record labels, people booking festivals they were paying attention to the blogs and they're not doing that today there's a million other ways and signals for them to look at a lot of noise out there. So, from my perspective blogs are not the best thing in terms of exposing yourself to an audience or picking up listeners. That's not the reason you should be going for them. I think blogs fit into this broader idea that as a DIY musician, you got to build up your presence and press kit, if you will, like it's your one pager basically that you're going to parcel if you want to get booked for a show or you want to do this. So let's say that you're trying to get booked for a show. That person's going to look you up and see if you're able to draw an audience for them. Right. So they're going to check your Spotify to make sure it's not dead. Spotify, I think, terrible way to drive fans to a live show spotifies to like globally scattered. It's a bad metric for whether someone can pull an audience at a show but still if I am trying to book you and I go on your Spotify and it's dead. Not a good signal right I want to see some some mid mid tier interaction going on there. Music blogs fit into this picture because they give you press quotes. So you when you when you're handing off your thing you've got, you know, like here's your bio someone wrote about you as a band or how amazing your releases or how epic you are you looking for these little pull quotes that you can include in your marketing materials. And the other thing that blogs help you with is that if I'm trying to book you and I search for you on Google. You don't want to just have a bunch of DSP links show up so that's like your Spotify link your SoundCloud link your YouTube link, you want to actually have some content there. And that also helps feed Spotify's little, what are they called I mean sorry Google their knowledge graph on the side of the search results as well. It's like this little call out window that has your info. I'm looking for some SEO content and some people writing about you. So, blogs can help you with full quotes, they can help you with your SEO. And the other thing is that blog content I find is often a little bit better to share with your fans. Let's say you have an audience on Instagram Facebook whatever. I got added to a playlist everyone go check it out on position number 73. Oh, never mind they took my song out it's like it's done right it's just it's not it's not the best experience to get your your existing fan base excited. Like you want to give them social proof that you are that you're doing well, and that they've made a good decision in liking your music. So that social proof is important and so blogs can also be leveraged that way. The content that you're sharing with your fans, it's going to be up for years. It's there. So, and then the fourth one is just a little bit of an ego stroke. It's nice to have someone write about your music. Just helps. But yeah, all of that is to say that at the end of the day blogs are not the king and queen makers that they used to be. Everyone has stepped up and taken that throne right people thought Spotify was going to be it, then tick tock was going to be it but if you look at it. There's like an interesting documentary Vox did recently about an analysis of tick tock hits in 2021 and they were like, okay 120 songs went viral. Like 90% of those artists were one hit wonders and were never able to pull it off again of the 10% like 70% of them tried to play their first gig and had no idea what they were doing. It's just, there is no like the golden era of blogs is, it was incredible for what it was. I don't think anything's replaced it and blogs certainly are not going to rise from the ashes and do it again. It's done. It's behind us. But they're still, they're still there for those those four things are listed out. Right. But I think that's because today things are so segmented and dispersed throughout the consumer sentiment versus the blogs were this bridge right so now consumers are blowing things up. It's less of a signal and it's harder to to scale where you have this gatekeeper of a sense of which were blogs for the better or worse. And if somebody does blow up because of their image on the blog the labels know I can keep going to these it's this really centralized space was super centralized. It's the initial pop, because the king and queen making isn't the initial pop it's the continuation after that. And it's hard to make the continuation happen on to wherever you, you know, you go. So, yeah, I mean, and also, to be fair, all those artists who did pop. I'm thinking some of the golden blog ones who are still around you got Kid Cudi Lana Del Rey Kendrick Lamar chance the rapper like all these guys. Oh a lot to blogging and the SoundCloud system and all of that but at the end of the day they're also incredibly talented and interesting musicians, and that helps but yet ultimately I think it boils down to that. At that time in history music blogs were the one stop shop that was the voice and today you now have so many different competing voices going on that as an artist. Even if you break out on one that's not necessarily enough to help catapult you into that, like Lady Gaga territory, how do you, how do you get there and I don't think that can be. That can be strategized or bought or paid for. It's just, it's just that thing right it's that thing it just has to be the perfect thing. Yep. Yeah agreed and I know you do business with major labels as well, or I think all three majors I read somewhere. Is there any difference between how they use you guys versus typical artists who's just coming through the website. Yeah, I think you did. You guys did an interesting video on on bots and how a lot of people in the industry are doing it and you kind of pointed to the fact that even major labels are doing it. So, I think they do approach things a little bit differently. So, first up, all three major labels are using it but they're also so fragmented I think a lot of people don't realize that the major labels are not a cohesive thing. Each, each office in each region is like operating on their own thing trying to fight their own battles and doing their own thing so I think we have close to 100 employees from each label using submit hub on the regular. They are pushing it all the time. For them, a lot of the logic is that submit hub is just a really easy way to just do their, their normal press cycle. So back on the day these guys used to email people out and do all of this. They want to come on submit hubs spend 20 minutes just select everyone and send their song now. And so they're less concerned about budgets for them submit hubs cheap as hell right they come on $100 to submit to 60 blogs. That means nothing to them right for an indie artist that's a pretty serious investment, especially when you don't know what you're going to get back. So a lot of the labels are coming in doing this. And you know what sucks for artists to is that often the songs that these labels are pushing are like they're top tier right. These labels are not representing objectively bad songs subjectively some people might think they are but like they are they're going to market things that they think are going to sell. So like these songs have mass appeal. And what that means is an artist is that you're competing with this flood of submissions coming through. For these labels, a lot of it is just getting that out of the way on the influencer side they're also playing that fake it till you make it game. So they're trying to fill up their song feeds with 200 videos. They don't really care what's going into the videos they just wanted to have 200 videos so that it looks some sort of social proof there they can tell their boss that their marketing budget was well spent and they need more. So, labels use it a lot more recklessly, but they've got different intentions in mind when they're doing it and they're working with much bigger budgets right 20,000 30,000 $40,000 a song. So they're taking a fraction of that and putting it into into a platform like submit hub and then they're going to an agency and they're doing like they're 10 big influence or shares or whatever it is that they do. You got independent. Special relationship. Do we have special relationships with them. Yeah, you guys curate them differently or manage. No, no, they don't get. No, they don't get any. The thing is shown to curators right alongside those. So there is no real differentiation there. They don't get, they don't have a secret back channel or special way to do it. It's like it's a completely level playing field. And I think many of them probably find that pretty frustrating because back in the blogging day, it hit a point where the only people who could break through the ones who could really afford a good publicist or schmooze the blogger by like taking them to a show and buying things. That was the, that was the blogging payola back in the day. It was never direct money for it was like hey come check out free tickets to a festival and oh yeah open bar. Hey, did you, here's my, here's my CD, did you check it out. So, yeah, no the labels don't get special treatment and they are a little bit more willy nilly in terms of how to do it. So this whole thing I'm hopping on about of, of trying to teach Spotify's algorithms and really focusing on the playlist that align with your song and doing that sort of research to make sure that it's right. They're not going to be doing that. Well, two things I think of like when you talk about how labels use it. I 100% would without even reaching out to you. As a label would just say why not right, we should just do this for every single artist what are the chances only X amount of dollars, our budget is obviously so much bigger so it's only $100. Why not just do the submission. If something happens that happens it's almost just a formality versus true expectations like an artist on the come up so I 100% get that. Then on the other end. I know a lot of the artist community is super skeptical. So it would be hard for him to believe man like the labels don't have any type of, you know, like you said back door. And I would only to that say, hey, you know I'm not here working for your company or anything I don't know all the details, but, but obviously in my label relationships one thing I can see as a benefit for not doing that is the labels are pretty and the expectations be annoying so if I had a tag is like hey yeah just use the tech. And, and you know, do it because I'm probably in probably not going to get extra extra mom that much extra money because so the labels are greedy, needy greedy and cheap. So, many artists don't even realize a lot of times I know you said that was $20,000 to $30,000 budgets but I can tell you how many pretty big artists we've worked with that only have three to $5,000 budgets. All right, so 20 to $30 like I mean, yeah, the labels the labels have big money. They have it, but they spend it very very frugally. So, you know, I definitely appreciate you sharing that. And with the idea of cheap or frugal in mind. I think I saw that influencers are somewhere between like two to $50 on your site one has that changed and to $2 who's posting for $2. Oh yeah. All right so you deep in the influencer game and I guess we can talk about it but a lot of these people we've encountered are pretty entitled and feel that their value is a lot higher than what I would say it's actually worth. What we found when we began approaching influencers at this point we don't have to anymore like word of mouth is great, but when we did a lot of them would say oh you know I charge $500 for placement. I'd be like wow that's a lot of money for your engagement levels. How many of those have you sold and they're like well you know I almost sold one in February but it didn't work out. We'll be like cool what if we give you $5 like 10 times a month. Just on the side you know we're not going to stop you from hustling in $500 sales but just it's just a regular flow of songs coming to in the background that you can add to your videos. So we found that it actually works really well to just here's the money. It's like here it is you can take it or you don't. Right and a lot of them it's not worth their time fair game, especially the ones with the managers they know what they're doing but we do find that a lot of we're dealing with micro influencers right. And the payments are based on their engagement, never number of followers we don't look at that also on the Spotify side number of followers is you know we look at it for potential fake growth but like it's not a good indicator of engagement. So yeah for the $2 one I think they need something like 2000 views per video average and that's on the lower end. So like 80% of their videos need to be above that lower end for them to qualify and and yeah the prices are we've undercut the market big time right. And that needs to come with realistic expectations about the quality that you get for that price right. So that's why I say like UMG comes along, they pump a bunch of money into this they love submit hub because a lot of these micro influencers come from developing nations to. So the UMG offices down in South America are using submit hub heavily to promote their content down in South America. And we're able to get them a lot of shares for a dollar or two each because in Columbia or Ecuador, a dollar or two is big real money, and can go like five times as far as it could in the states. So, but yeah even in even in the states right I think we've got about 200 active influencers from the states and you'll see that those prices are also quite low. The trick here is that they're micro influencers they are there they're not Kim Kardashian they're not even close like they are, they are the people following Kim Kardashian they are, they're not out there right and and for me I think it's just important to come into influencer stuff with realistic expectations about what you're going to get out of it, you're not going to go viral you, you cannot pay for virality. Some people do it. We've had it happen once or twice on submit hub but those guys were really clever about, like one guy created a game on tiktok you got a guy from fiver to make a game that was synced to his song, and he uploaded that and he used submit hub to get it out there but the game is like what went. That's what went viral submit hub would just just sort of started the process so. And the influencer side it's a it's been a three years of painful learning but at this point we're feeling we're on top of it right like we're constantly trying to make like these guys they'll take down videos if they can they'll try to share the wrong song if they can they'll get their friends to post a video and I've managed to to with code sold every single one of those problems. And if they misbehave, we take their money away. And we actually hold their money for a little while it's like a bit of escrow right we hold it to make sure that that content gets shared properly and doesn't get like you initially we had issues with people who would share, take the money, take the video down. Okay, hold it hold it and then and then we sometimes we go mafia. Is that like that a lot of the growth that the influence decided is word of mouth and referrals, so they get referral bonuses for signing up their friends and if like if your friend messes up. You're losing your access or break your legs because they done something bad so you better get them back on before we go all Italian style on you. I love so. It's look it's not that it's got its purpose right the influence remark and I think is good. If you want to fill up your feed with that sort of content. Or you can pay people so you can pay a little bit of extra for them to do stuff like dress up a certain way or lip sync or whatever. You can treat those as as essentially miniature music videos. So you're paying someone to create content to your video, and then you can share that with your existing fan base but don't go we won't people don't go into this thinking you're going to blow up and don't use it if you don't use tiktok, like just don't even bother you got to be, you got to live tiktok to really care about blowing up on tiktok. Anyway, that's my take. It sounds like a lot of ticket which tiktok is in general but you know if I can get so many posts for cheap. Yes, you shouldn't expect things to blow up, but the reality of tiktok is a micro influencer can blow up. So it's like this cheap lotto ticket I don't necessarily expect to win when I go to the gas station and pay a lot a dollar for this scratch off. However, I could win right, I could win so just knowing that possibilities there is, but it's better than a lot of ticket because you're not just you're not just paying this potential of could win I think it's just important to go into it thinking about like what you're actually getting out of it because at the end of the day. You got to set your expectation that that's all you're going to get out of it. If that lotto ticket blows up. Amazing. Right. But, but go into it knowing like I'm paying for this because I want to fill up my feed and that's all I'm going to get out of it, or I'm paying for this because I'm looking for people to further whatever your brand is like if you are marshmallow man and you want people to fucking eat marshmallows while they listen to your song, like that can help further your brand. But, but we're all about brands here right. That's up a type of stuff is a great idea by the way I wish more artists would do that like I we paid influencers like to put on certain costumes like bought them off of Amazon ship them to their address so they can do certain things, all using influencers more creatively and taking more control over even their creative. I've seen a lot of returns from that because even if the video doesn't blow up. Now you have this specific creative that's a lot cheaper than asking somebody hey can you create a video for me outside of the tick tock space it's such a really weird thing. If I do a casting and a shoot, and you shoot a video you would have to pay people so much money, but for if you're saying hey I want to shoot a tick tock that video instantly becomes so much cheaper. So I think that's a valuable way to think about it because because you're probably not going to get much more than that so if you want to jump into that. How are you going to leverage that like what are you going to use if you got everyone dressed up in a costume what's that for are you going to cut it up into a music video is that the content you share like are you just trying to. I think it's I think it's a much better strategy to go into it with and you can do that on submit hub it's called special request and you fill it out and sometimes people waste their money doing things like just whatever you do just enjoy the song, but others get really creative. Yeah, yeah you just paid extra money to tell them to just enjoy the song. But but like this guy who made this video game filter that was genius right and his special request the thing he paid extra money for was your video has got to use this this filter game, whatever. If they don't do that the artist with the system we have in place is you can instantly ask for either your money back or they got to redo the video. So we try to stay out of the dispute process but yeah it's it's all about trying to do it at scale micro numbers at scale. Yeah. So, speaking of at scale, you have not necessarily a tech platform is tech enabled right. Of course. Yeah. Right but you know dealing with a lot of humans because of the market place nature of it. But with the foundation you've built, because I know dealing with humans right, especially a scale I can get annoying. Have you found ways or thought of are seeing new problems because of the marketplace you created that you feel like you guys in the future might have some full blown tech that would come from this. Look, so, so I have a big advantage where I am the tech I write all the tech for submit hub. And the advantage I have is that I like I'm also in this space right so I understand the industry and the way that people use it and I'm thinking about ways that they can get advantages from it. And what that means is that I can very quickly turn around and respond to things. So a lot of other guys running competitors have to sit down with their tech team explain what they're doing, write it up, get the plan going said a deadline do all of the stuff and for me I can just be like oh damn we need to do this boom boom boom. So, a lot of the customer support problems and issues we've had curating our curators. We have managed to solve from a tech standpoint when I say we. We're a team of those five of us. And so I'm doing all the tech but like Dylan who's been my right hand man for since since submit hub was about four months old. He would basically call him a policeman, but his job is to go around and make sure that curators are behaving, and they're doing the right thing for artists and they're not they're not putting us at risk as a company, we don't want to be exposing artists to risky stuff. It happens that there's been seven years now and shit's happened. And so we were constantly having to respond to that and try to get better at handling those and what we do find is that a lot of it is automatable with code. So, like the same the same issue keeps coming up. For example, I mentioned the influencers where they're running away with their money before they've properly delivered the goods cool so we can code away to delay the how the money comes or if there's a dispute, we can code away for that dispute to be between the artist and the influencer first and then it only gets escalated to us afterwards. So we're able to deal with things at scale like this by sitting down identifying the problem and then thinking about whether we can, we can either eliminate that problem altogether. So whether it's like a confusing feature that people are reaching out to us about, or if it's a dispute process like how can we do something that they handle that smoothly without us having to get involved. So, yeah, from, from that tech standpoint, it's a constant game of cat and mouse. My grandmother, bless her soul is 93 now but she's, she often asked me like aren't you done? Like what? Haven't you finished it? Like why do you still coding? And I'm like no, you know, that's the thing you constantly do this and there are people that are trying to take advantage of the system figure out ways that I'll give you one today. Here's sneaky, sneaky artist. Paid for a bunch of influencers shares. Why not to submit hub? Edited the song to be a different song and then went back to all those influencers and said hey you shared the wrong song. You got to share it again. It's clever. It was clever of that dude. But, but like, okay, so now we have to step in and deal with that fall out and be like hey, so we, you know, we've checked the logs here and we can tell that last week you had a totally different question here and you've just edited it. So yeah, there are these constant surprises that we get that are throwing us off. And, and like the technology is a cool part of that whether that I don't think that's going to go out beyond that. I mean that was sort of your question like is there some tech stack that's going to emerge from this that'll be the slayer but it's designed for what it does. And I think we are the best in the space at doing this we're not, we're not perfect, but like leagues ahead of the competition in terms of genre matching statistics and policing. And I think the other guys are trying to do this in earnest, many of them but like we got that first mover advantage, so we are off. Got you. Got you. Last question how many hours a week do you spend coding. Oh, not enough. It varies. I, I, on any given day I'd say about half my time I spent coding, usually three to four hours. I work in three hour chunks I work three hours in the morning three hours in the afternoon and three hours at night. But sometimes that night session is like catching up on Reddit or whatever. Those days, those days are my dedicated day when I'm like to my wife hey. Can you just keep the kids on the low down can you drop them off at school and pick them up because I'm going to eat a space cake and I'm just going to code the whole fucking day. So I do try to set aside time to get through those. Those days are my big project days be like all right I'm in my bubble here we go. Yeah, I'm probably still doing about 20 to 30 hours of code a week. Yeah. Okay, man. Well, congrats on everything you guys have done so far and definitely enjoyed this conversation I think you dropped a lot of valuable information will definitely find the snippets that we think will touch people I dropped the bombs. But then of course we'll drop the full interview as well. Is there any lasting thing you want to leave people with I think I think it's just important to know, because a lot of artists are coming to you for holistic advice on how they should run the many different aspects of being a DIY artist. So similar tools are not like a one stop shop they're not the egg in the basket that's going to solve everything. There's a lot of people out there trying to hustle to take your money so you got to be careful about what you do but like the, I think submit hub is best served as a as an egg in your basket of different approaches that you're taking so like in concert with your Instagram advertising. So maybe you've taken your bot strategy and you're trying to pump up your YouTube with some emojis. I don't know. But like there's a million different ways to do it it's like throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks. So if you use submit hub, and you find it comes up with lackluster results for you. What happens sometimes not everyone can get the success that they want and we don't try to always sell ourselves as a success machine that's not what we are we're just trying to make the connections easy and transparent. So yeah I think my main takeaway here is that if you're an artist. So this is your oyster today there are a million different ways to go at it and you just got to keep trying with all of them and submit it's just one of them. There's other ways to do it too. Got it. Got it. Love it man. Appreciate that lasting that last word. Again you guys this is Jason Grishkoff. He is the founder of submit hub. I am brand man Sean. Have a good day.