Time to tackle a controversial service that many new artists like myself have fallen victim to - playlisting services. The most popular services in this space are Groover, Daily Playlists, and SubmitHub.

Imagine this scenario. You’ve just released your first album and you want as many ears to hear it as possible. You find yourself with no following, but a few bucks you could throw at a playlisting service in hopes to hit it big and get on a popular playlist. Should you take the shot?

In this post, I’ll give an explanation of these services, why I think they should be avoided, and then I’ll share the campaigns I ran. I’ll cover everything from dollars spent to streams received.

What are playlisting services?

For those that haven’t been introduced yet, these playlisting services enable you to pitch your tracks to “curators” - whether they be playlist creators, blogs, reviewers, etc.. - in hopes that they will share your work.

You pay some amount of money to pitch to a curator, the curator will provide some feedback, and you’ll get a decision whether they will share your track or not.

Issues with playlisting services

While the premise sounds nice if you’re wanting to promote your release, there are a few inherent flaws with these systems.

The curator’s playlist may not get many active listeners

There’s no guarantee that if your track does get shared that it will actually amount to any number of streams from the playlist. It could have thousands of likes but that does not equate to thousands of active listeners.

I call this out below, but SubmitHub will at least give you an estimate. The others provide no info like that. So you can try to pick your curators by going off playlist likes, but again, playlist likes do not equate to active listeners.

I share all my numbers below, but some of these playlists are netting less than 2 streams per week.

If the playlist does get active listeners, they may be bots.

Bot streams are becoming a huge issue and services like Spotify are trying to track down on this. The streams you get from these may equate to 0 “real” listeners.

Even worse, some artists are getting banned streaming services if their tracks get too many bot streams. Here’s a statement from DistroKid saying how they’ll remove your release if too many of the streams are “artificial”.

Feedback is generic

If the curator chooses to not share your track, they’ll typically give some sort of feedback. This is nice since it’s always great to get feedback on your music. However, from my experience, the “feedback” is always phoned in and just follows a generic template.

All in all, it’s a waste of money.

Even if you do get onto playlists, you may get a small number of streams. Those streams may be bots. Those botted streams may get you in trouble. AND you have to pay money for all of that?

My Campaigns

I believe I can talk to these services because I’ve used them myself. Multiple times, unfortunately. I’ve actually gotten streams off of these platforms, but I don’t think these are a good use of your hard earned money. I’ll share all my numbers below.

I first want to share my experience using these services. I’ve pitched songs on Groover, Daily Playlists, and SubmitHub with varying degrees of “success”. Let’s walk through it.

First Campaign

In January 2023, I released my first album. I was so excited to share it with the world and came across SubmitHub while researching how to reach more listeners.

I pitched my track, “Tim Robbins”, to a total of 9 curators for a total of $16. Typically on these sties, your pitch can result in one of 3 statuses:

• Declined - the curator doesn’t want to share your track but will give you some feedback on it

• Shared - the curator shares your track

• Expired - the curator doesn’t engage with your pitch and you get refunded in credits to use on Groover

My first pitch resulted in a breakdown of 8 declines and 1 share.

First Campaign Shares

As stated above, my track landed on a playlist!

And here’s the number of listeners and number of streams from that playlist:

Honestly, this was pretty exciting. Like I said, I was brand new to releasing music and getting almost 400 streams on the one track from this playlist was really fun to see.

I will say, out of all of these services, SubmitHub is the most transparent. They track exactly when your track was added and removed from a playlist. And more importantly, they give a rough estimate of how many listeners that playlist gets. We’ll see some other examples of shares later on with other services where my track got less than 5 streams from a playlist. Obviously if I had known that going in, I would not have shared.

But one of the challenges with these services is you have no idea if these are real listeners or not. If they are real and some percentage enjoy your track, you’d expect to see an uptick in the rest of your catalog but unfortunately there’s no way I’m aware of to know that for sure.

First Campaign Feedback

The majority of the feedback you get from these types of services follows a blueprint.

My feedback for this submission was no different:

You get the idea. This is one reason why these services are so frustrating. The curators will share a huge list of genres that they want and then will still tell you your track doesn’t fit with their genre and there’s nothing you can do.

It’s more likely that the whole "this isn’t my typical style” is often a way to avoid directly saying they didn't like your track. Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever gotten direct feedback like that which I’d much prefer.

First Campaign Summary

Let’s break down the numbers:

• $16 spent

• 1 share

• 8 declines

• 373 streams

That gives us 23 streams per dollar spent. That doesn’t feel great but to be honest it’s not terrible. At least it wouldn’t be terrible if I knew they weren’t botted streams.

Second Campaign

Even though my first campaign with SubmitHub didn’t do a whole lot, I for some reason felt the need to do another campaign on my next release.

This time, I pitched my track “Start” to 14 curators on Groover. This time I got 2 shares, 1 “promise to share”, 7 declines, and 4 pitches that expired (you get refunded credits when this happens).

So far, these two shares have netted me a total of 7 streams out of the combined ~22 days that they’ve been active.

Second Campaign Feedback

Honestly, it’s the just the same stuff I shared above, but might as well put it here too.

Second Campaign Summary

• $39 spent

• 2 share

  • 1 promise to share - no idea if that will ever actually happen

• 7 declines

• 7 streams

That gives me 0.17 streams per dollar spent. Not the best use of money if you ask me.

Why do we use these?

Why did I fall for this twice? Why do countless other artists use the services?

We just want our music to be heard. These services prey on the musicians who create songs as a hobby and want to share with as many ears as they can. They believe they can share examples of how artists have gotten popularity from these streams, thinking you can do the same.

Do me a favor and don’t make the same mistakes I have. Don’t use these services.

Wrapping it up

Hopefully you can walk away with this article with enough information so you don’t fall victim to these services as well. Even if you do end up getting shared to a bunch of playlists, there’s no guarantee of streams.

There are better ways to spend your money if you’re trying to promote your album - namely Facebook/Instagram ads.

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