MusicSubmit.com Review: My Honest Experience (and review) Using The Platform

In today’s age, music is everywhere. But how does it get there? Obviously social media now allows anyone to promote, publicize and, yes even advertise, their own products and services. But there is still a very special and unique place for intra-industry marketing services. In many cases, as most of you in the music industry know, this is how the promotion game works. Music promoters and solicitors build relationships with the people who serve music to their customers. They need good music so their customers listen to their channels, stations, and ultimately, buy ads. Even when it comes to internet radio, it’s in hopes that viewers, or listeners as it were, will click ads, or listen to 10 second ad spots, etc. So the whole promotion industry is predicated upon those relationships. This of course coming at a premium cost. (somewhere around $500-1500 a week.)

Enter MusicSubmit.com. A website who claims to promote your music to “get your songs in rotation on radio stations (web, college, FM), reviewed on blogs, and posted in music communities.” I purchased a package for roughly $200 dollars that was suited to my genre of music. Before I used MusicSubmit.com, I used another website, MusicXray as a gauge of how marketable the music would be in the first place – not that I ever doubt my gut, of course 😉 – but after I had confirmed that it was highly marketable, was 90% of industry professionals who heard it considering it a hit, I set about to then do the next logical thing – promote it on MusicSubmit.com to get it out to the masses at a discount.

I’ll keep this relatively short, but the first thing I noticed is that it’s a somewhat drawn out process, and while I’m not sure why, it may be for artists’ actual statistical advantages. I’m assuming so, otherwise it defeats the purpose of sending music out so slowly to contacts. After about a month or so, I think all 650 blogs, radio stations and other personnel were in receipt of my music, which I could track on MusicSubmit’s handy artist and label dashboard. All in all, 31 people accepted the music in my promotion campaign (of 650) yet only 25 had downloaded it. Some probably want physical CD’s shipped to them, which isn’t going to happen considering that we are now in 2015 and most CD’s I have laying around are coasters or artifacts. It’s so simple, (perhaps TOO simple many copyright holders would argue,) to do these days. But I digress. 25 people were in actual receipt of my music now. Awesome!

Except.

Of those 25 website, none were FM stations, most were online radio, none were blogs that wrote a word about my campaign, (one actually used the service to privately SOLICIT me to PAY them money to write an article about me on their wacky, poor website, which had few if any visitors!) which brings me to the main point – most of the station websites who accepted my music look like GeoCities websites circa 1998 – kid you not – very outdated, not well designed, not very professional, and well, in general just dodgy. If you can imagine a “Grandma Jean’s Pancakes and Music” internet radio station, that’s kind of the idea of what you get with the service. This is my own experience. I’m not saying it has been everyone’s. But it has been mine.

And for that reason, I can, in confidance, tell you that in my professional opinion, it’s just not money well spent. There are so many other things you can do today for $200 dollars than spend it on MusicSubmit.com – like get CD artwork designed, a logo for your band, an entire website… the list goes on. But to have your music promoted to sketchy “internet radio stations” with virtually no significant listener base isn’t one of them.

P.S. I will say that I got ONE personal e-mail from a lady who actually e-mailed me regarding my music who has a very small live365 equivalent internet radio station and she seemed like a very friendly person. But that’s one of 650.

Caveat Emptor.

-David Verity