Jason Grishkoff:
If you were to take a room of a hundred people from a random sample of America and you played a song by Lady Gaga, I bet you 98 out of 100 of them would not know what that song is and not like it. And yet that two out of a hundred, the 2% makes her one of the biggest mega stars alive today. So I think coming into platforms like SubmitHub, it's important to keep the same thing in mind and to not dwell on the 80% who tell you they don't like your song, but you're trying to identify that two out of 100 or hopefully a higher ratio when you're on SubmitHub who can connect with your music and hopefully expose it to like-minded people with a similar taste. So yeah, I mean the rejection's tough, but that, that's really rather than trying to impress them and win them over, it's more about finding the people who already like your stuff and then going from there.

Michael Walker:
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Excited to be here today with the one and only Jason Grishkoff. So Jason is the founder of SubmitHub. If you're a musician then it's likely that you've heard of SubmitHub at some point or another. If you haven't, they're a platform that helps connect musicians with curators and influencers. They've had over 3.5 million approved submissions, over 821,000 users on their platform. I think that's, I mean, would've to compare, but I think that SubmitHub's the number one platform in the world right now that does what you do. So super cool.
So specifically today, I wanted to use it as an opportunity to be able to share some insight with artists who might be using the platform or interested in using the platform. I'm sure you've seen so many different examples of how to do it in the right way now and how to do it in the wrong way. And so it'd be great to get your perspective on how to use this amazing tool and platform you've created to really help musicians grow. I'd love to hear a little bit about your story and how you got started SubmitHub and grew it to the number one platform in the world.

Jason Grishkoff:
Cool. I mean, I won't dwell too much on the history. To sum it up quickly, I started music blogging in 2007. I had a music blog, still do. It's called Indie Shuffle. It grew to be one of the bigger, more popular music blogs at the time and part of that was my ability to, well, I essentially became obsessed with developing the product itself. So for most music bloggers you were focused on music and blogging and for me it became an obsession of code, product, and growing the traffic to the website. So we were one of the first websites on the internet that allowed you to listen to music while you navigated around the website, which today take it for granted. Back then it was magic, right? It's one of those perfect examples where, I mean of course the music keeps playing, isn't that what it's supposed to do? But it didn't back then and we did it.
So Indie Shuffle grew and it grew and we rode that wave of the blogosphere. Won't get into that one too much, but there was a point in time where music blogs were king makers and queen makers. If you were on the right side of the blogs, you'd be booked to headline Coachella, right? We collectively, about a thousand of us had all the influence in the music industry and Indie Shuffle was right up there riding that wave. That was cool. But one of the downsides was that I was getting 300 plus emails a day and that became quite unmanageable to deal with and eventually I just started to ignore it. I set up a fake email address, told people to hit me up there and then I just never opened it.
So if you were an artist in 2013, 2014, 2015, part of your promotion strategy was first realizing that the internet exists and you need to do digital promo, maybe you would contact a publicist and they'd give you a quote for $2,000 per month over three months to run an ad campaign or promo campaign and then you go, okay, crap, hold on. Can I do this myself? And then you go buy a spreadsheet for $20 with 500 emails in it and BCC everyone and send it out. And we as bloggers hated that. And you as an artist got no response at all.
So there was this perfect background storm of display advertising dying and music blogs losing their revenue and Spotify growing and Google changing the way that search engines do. And the net effect was that music blog started to lose their thunder, their power, 2014, 2015, and I started to think, okay man, I got to figure out what to do with myself here. Because I had quit Google to take Indie Shuffle full-time. Went from a really cushy salary to, oh crap, it's all disappearing. And so I wanted to take the skills I'd learned building Indie Shuffle and create a new technology software platform that would streamline the process of artists getting in touch with blogs.
So SubmitHub was born seven years ago, Friday I think, so we're now seven years and four days old. But the idea when I launched it was a really simple form where you would fill in the artist name, song title, paste your link, and then I used that Automagic code on the backend to translate that link into a nice unified player. And so when I opened up my SubmitHub Feed, there were my 300 songs waiting for me, but they were consistent in a nice feed and a thumb up notified you said, Hey Indie Shuffle likes this, you're going to get a blog post out of it. Thumb down meant, sorry buddy, it's not going to happen. And things took off really quickly within the first months there were a few thousand registered users already and I managed to sign up quite a few other blogs who were having the same problem and with whom I developed that network.
And yeah, it's now been seven years of this. I have not stopped coding day in and day out building the product to try and streamline and make as transparent as possible this connection between curators and musicians. So the SubmitHub you see today still has the original core functionality of artists pitching songs to curators, but the technology has come so much further and we're just sitting on so much data that we can use to try and improve those matches, set expectations, and ultimately we never commit to delivering success, that's something we can get into and that's really difficult to get. You can't guarantee it, right? It's a subjective thing. But what we're quite confident about now is that the connections themselves are streamlined and transparent. So that's kind of the rapid history of how SubmitHub came to be.

Michael Walker:
Cool. Oh man, that's so interesting. And as you were describing that, one thing that popped into my mind is right now at the time of recording this, there's a lot of, in the news cycle, it's Elon Musk purchased Twitter and I'm not sure how up to date you are on that whole thing, but one of his moves is that he wants to make Twitter a subscription platform and create this gate, because this gate, the idea is that it will remove a lot of the spam, a lot of the bots and make it a lot more expensive to create bots or kind of fake things. So one thing that stands out to me in terms of what you built with your platform is one, the value proposition of yeah, you can pay someone thousands of dollars per month to kind of go do this, but now you have a platform where for a significant fraction of the price, you can directly get synced up with those right people.
It's kind of a bridge and one way of looking at it that it's also a better, it's a service for the curators as well, because it kind of filters out all of the, or a good amount of the either bot generated slash free traffic or just like you BCC everyone and drop it. So that's kind of an interesting tie in. I'm not sure if we'll see what happens with Elon and Twitter or whatnot, but I think the idea of gating that type of access seems like a really smart way to benefit both parties.

Jason Grishkoff:
It's a double-edged sword, so it has made the ability to connect with and find curators way easier. And so what that means is that we already know that there are more artists now than there have ever been releasing more songs than they've ever been. And they're all competing with each other and they're competing with a hundred years of back catalog. Every day it gets harder and harder and harder. And what's happened on SubmitHub is that ease of use and accessibility actually means that many of these artists are actually using it and competing against each other.
So it's not necessarily making it easier. But on a tangent, one thing you did make me think about is what people sometimes don't see is that we are effectively curating the curators. So we are protecting artists from fake playlisters, fake accounts, and people who want to take advantage of them. So I do often see, I mean I don't think Elon Musk is going to solve this Twitter thing because one of the problems with Twitter is it's just a really negative space for people to go to complain and oh gosh, I've heard the phrase before, but where you try to make yourself look better than other people.

Michael Walker:
A lot of social media in general, right?

Jason Grishkoff:
Yeah. And it's just not a healthy ecosystem. But I do go on them fairly frequently to see what people are complaining about with SubmitHub and they're often complaining about things. It's never easy to be rejected and SubmitHub, seven years ago you sent out 500 emails, no one responded. Well, at least you didn't get stabbed in the heart. Now you contact 50 bloggers and 45 of them tell you they don't like your song. Ouch dude. And I sympathize with that and there's no easy solution for it. We've improved the targeting enough, so when it launched and for the first three or four years, I think it was about a 10% approval rate, now it's in the 20% range and that's due to improved targeting. But at the end of the day, I guess my point is that it's not so much that there's a higher quality or a filter for the artists. So actually what I think is interesting here is that we are constantly filtering the curators to make sure that we're presenting directory of people who can actually help artists in some way, shape or form.

Michael Walker:
Very cool. Yeah, that's interesting. That's really a major part of it is curating the curators as well. And interesting, especially when it comes to our artwork and our music, it can feel really personal if we get rejected or so yeah, I can see how that would be a difficult thing to stomach for some people especially. But also at the same time it seems like, you got to develop thick skin if you want to be successful as a musician, you have to acknowledge that not everyone's going to enjoy it or appreciate it and that it's okay. In some cases, even the people close to you, like your friends and family, they want to support you but might not like the music. Right? But some people, some will literally enjoy it if you find those right people. And those are the ones that it really matters to be able to serve.

Jason Grishkoff:
To put it in some perspective, if you were to take a room of a hundred people from a random sample of America and you played a song by Lady Gaga, I bet you 98 out of a hundred of them would not know what that song is and not like it. And yet that two out of a hundred, the 2% makes her one of the biggest megastar alive today. So I think coming into platforms like SubmitHub, it's important to keep the same thing in mind and to not dwell on the 80% who tell you they don't like your song, but you're trying to identify that two out of 100 or hopefully a higher ratio when you're on SubmitHub who can connect with your music and hopefully expose it to like-minded people with a similar taste. Yeah, I mean the rejection's tough, but that that's really, rather than trying to impress them and win them over, it's more about finding the people who already your stuff and then going from there. So it can be helpful in that sense. And that's one way to get past the rejection. Just remind yourself that even the biggest megastars out there face a similar level of rejection.

Michael Walker:
Yeah, that's such a good point. And I feel like it's a valuable lesson to come back to as musicians appreciating that just because someone doesn't like your music, that sometimes you use this analogy where it's like we all resonate at a certain frequency. Our music is sort of like let's imagine that my songs are like, I'm resonating at this frequency, a C chord. And if you put it in front of someone who's playing a different chord and just resonates at a different frequency, they both sound fine by themselves, but when you put them together it just clashes or doesn't fit. And it's not necessarily because either one is wrong, it's just different resonation. And so it sounds like what you're saying is that part of the engine of SubmitHub and why it's gotten so much, it's improved significantly and probably a big reason why it's become the number one platform is because of your ability to use data to basically figure out this person's resonating at this frequency, I guess we should match them up with these curators and they resonate.

Jason Grishkoff:
I wish I could say that, man, that sounds like a good approach to do. It's such a subjective thing. I mean I suppose, yeah, I could look at it, you would have to have a big enough sample size. So you submit to 20 or 30 people, you get rejected by 25, you get approved by five. And then I say, okay, who are the five approved? You find similar ones and then recommend it. I don't do that. But that's a really logical way to approach it. Maybe one day I should try to think of it that way.

Michael Walker:
Well and you said that ideas have curated the curators that are like you, that's part of why it went from 10% to 20% because you're like matching them with the right people.

Jason Grishkoff:
Well, so genre matching is a real important part of it and it's a very subjective thing, what genre you're in. And you often find that two people have different definitions of the same genre. And so that can be difficult. And one of the steps that we took to improve that was really to expand the number of genres that we feature on SubmitHub. So we started with five, I think we had hip hop, rock, electronic, pop and other, and now we've got about 230 genres on there. So that granularity allows for better match ups.
We also do a better job setting expectations. So if there is someone on SubmitHub who approves one out of every 1000 submissions, we're telling you that. In some cases we'll actually automatically hide them so that you cannot send to them. We're basically saying, Hey dude, don't waste your time here. There's a 99.9% chance of rejection, so you're just tossing away your credits.
So there've been a lot of lessons that we've learned along the way in terms of how to make sure that people are not making bad decisions about who to send to and are better aligned with that. So that is sort of the algorithmic stuff behind it. This genre match algorithm I wrote, I actually looked back at two weeks ago and I wondered what the heck I wrote and I had to spend some time going through it. I'm like, oh yeah, all right, okay, let's see what I did, yeah, that makes sense. So these underlying things going on that sort of help drive the decisions and push people towards that and yeah, I mean I think in large part that's what has driven that improvement in sort of matching. But I don't go back and take a sample size and grow from there.
And I think one of my hesitations there is I don't pushing SubmitHub as a product. We don't have a marketing team, we don't do advertising. And for me to do something like that I'd have to say, Hey, it's me, SubmitHub, looks like you sent to too many people, we've found another 50 matches for you. Why don't you come on in and track? It just feels kind of salesy and I don't feel comfortable doing that at this point. I mean think what you're onto is a good idea and there probably are cleaner ways that it can be conveyed without feeling like a pitch. But yeah, I am but a mortal.

Michael Walker:
Well as someone who has felt, I think especially musicians, we come from a camp where the last thing we want is to come across as salesy or manipulative or trying to convince someone to do something that isn't in their best interest. And it seems like just from our short conversation we've had so far that that's really the ethos of what you've created is you want to create a platform that genuinely serves people. And even in that analogy with the chords, I think the genre matching that you're doing could be seen as a strong way which you are doing to match up those people and make sure that they resonate with each other. But yeah, definitely interesting as a potential opportunity is using big data to basically match and find based on those recommendations, these are people most likely to resonate.

Jason Grishkoff:
Machine learning and artificial intelligence, SubmitHub the first machine learning artificially intelligently powered web3, SubmitHub token. There are endless ways to go about it. I try to operate in spaces I feel comfortable in and I think what you're suggesting is cool. One of the more likely things I'll do sometime soon is to look at the artists that you find yourself similar to and then look at the artists that curators are approving, look for overlaps, and then recommend people who overlap.

Michael Walker:
Yeah. That makes a ton of sense.

Jason Grishkoff:
So if you say, oh my music sounds like Bonobo and Tyco and Emancipator, I'll be like, okay, cool, down tempo, cool, run it through this thing that I'll use, Spotify's API actually does, there's some things they're great at revealing and other things that they suck at revealing, like listeners, they don't tell you how many listeners a playlist has. We've got that, I use data for that one.

Michael Walker:
Cool.

Jason Grishkoff:
But they're good at revealing similar artists. So you can pull up an artist profile on Spotify and you can just see that similar artist section and sometimes it's accurate, sometimes it's not, but you can still use that as a reference. And then I could go through a playlist and say, okay, there are 50 songs in here, here are the artists that show up most often as similar and then build overlaps from there. So I think that's actually on my wishlist. If you go to submithub.com/stories, you'll see my wishlist of all the features I hope to code.

Michael Walker:
Cool.

Jason Grishkoff:
And that is one of them.

Michael Walker:
Awesome.

Jason Grishkoff:
I don't think it's going to happen this year, but maybe early next year.

Michael Walker:
Yeah. Very cool. So just out of curiosity, when it comes to Spotify's API with the suggested music, is that just on an artist by artist basis or can you do that same thing with a song where it's suggested song based on a certain track?

Jason Grishkoff:
I haven't looked. So their API is public and well documented. Pretty much anyone can sign up to it. And I know that it's definitely possible to look up similar artists. I don't know about similarity for songs. I wouldn't be surprised if it's possible. A lot of the stuff I've done with their API does involve sort of connecting the dots and figuring things out. So for example, on our playlists, I do some audio analysis of all of the playlists. So I take all of the songs in there, run this audio analysis with all this data that Spotify gives me, and then try to come up with trends, like how niche is their playlist? Are they consistent within BPM and genres and valence and whatnot, or are they just all over the place? Because a playlist that's all over the place is actually probably not a very good playlist.
And one of those that's really focused on a niche, like they do thrash metal and that's their thing, that's a good playlist. So you don't want to steer clear of a playlist that's like New Pop Friday and has a hip hop song followed by an EDM song, followed by a, it sends all the wrong signals to Spotify and they're unable to use their machine learning and artificial intelligence to figure out who you sound like. I mean, that's the whole thing. And if you can teach Spotify who you sound like, then you're going to have a better chance of showing up in their algorithmic playlists. So if they see a consistent trend, artist A and artist B are constantly overlapping, then they'll recommend the fan bases to each other. So yeah, one of the cool things I can do with Spotify's API is identify where those overlaps are and which playlists are strongly aligned with the direction an artist might want to go. So right now I do that on the nicheness and the genres, but I think adding in the artist element would be cool and is totally doable with their API.

Michael Walker:
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Cool. Very interesting. Yeah, I know I was just using Spotify two days ago to create a playlist and they had suggested songs for a playlist, so that either they could be recommending it based on similar artists, but it seems like there's a fair chance that it's something on the song basis or the playlist level where it's suggested songs for a playlist.

Jason Grishkoff:
I mean, I can pull it up and check, but it's there, it's there. So you're right, they're either doing it on a track by track basis, but I know that at the very least the API allows you to do it on an artist basis. So you can look up an artist. Let's say you added three artists to that and all three of them had one overlapping artist that they shared in common, and that's an obvious recommendation that they could make. So yeah.

Michael Walker:
Very cool.

Jason Grishkoff:
I think it's a cool thing to dive into. My database is getting big.

Michael Walker:
Yeah.

Jason Grishkoff:
I think it's about 80 gigabytes now in the database. Yeah.

Michael Walker:
Yeah, I mean part of me, why I'm asking some of these questions why I'm curious about this is with our software as a service street team, I think that one of the next big movements is going to be linking artists to similar artists based on their music and based on that type of PI integration. So I see that, I'm like, gosh, that'd be really cool if you just had a list of here's the top 10 artists that you should reach out to and build a relationship with and potentially play a show together, do collaboration with, because there's a lot of alignment there and you guys would likely, you'd have a lot of overlap with your fans would be kind of an interesting one. Although you'd want to suggest people who weren't exactly the same but complimentary. So it's not like you're all playing just the same note, which doesn't add really a whole lot of resonance or harmony, but instead it's like you're all playing a slightly different note in the chords. So it's like they come together and they create a symphony, but it's better that they're not exactly the same.

Jason Grishkoff:
Yeah, you might have trouble doing that with Spotify's API. Worth a shot though. I think, so some of the cool things you said there, I mean you would want it to be localized and I'm not sure if they actually provide localized information. You'd have to dig around and see what's in there, but you could definitely, but then it's the chicken or the egg thing and this is maybe where SubmitHub comes in is that if you're a brand new artist, you don't have that similar artist section yet because you haven't taught Spotify what you sound like. And I've seen artists really mess that up by, the worst thing you can do is go on one of those, go on Instagram and hit up a Spotify playlist and pay $20 to get put in. Total scam and it's going to screw you completely because now you're getting put in a playlist with all the other artists who paid $20 and that's what Spotify thinks you're similar to.

Michael Walker:
Yeah. Oh that's interesting. Yeah, it's kind of like if you are, I'm really harping on this analogy, you're going to feel it works for it, but it's like you're playing this and then you artificially add in bunch of other ones, it's like it's going to muddy the waters. It's like no actually it sounds like what you're saying you want to find out where are those harmonies And it sounds like SubmitHub is a great place where there's an opportunity to dial in what are some of those harmony notes? Or at least it's something that you're going to be with folks on-

Jason Grishkoff:
To put it differently actually you want to send out a signal, you want to play music loudly to try to find and attract the people who you might align with. So really it is about sending that signal and teaching Spotify's algorithms where you should fit. So if you are a C chord and you want to find other C chords, like you got to go on there and get yourself into playlists where those existing ones exist. That's a lot of existence. But hopefully that makes sense. You want to make sure that if you sound like Bonobo, try get yourself into other playlists that feature Bonobo and get your song played alongside Bonobo because then Spotify sees cool, your song keeps getting played in conjunction, I bet they're a similar artist and boom, now you've got that, you've taught Spotify where you land. So I think that's really one useful way to think about playlists because realistically I'm quite a pessimist about the impact that a playlist can have, even an editorial Spotify playlist, the holy grail of what everyone's after.
Getting into it is a temporary boost and what happens is that typically when you get removed from these playlists, you see a complete drop in listeners, but they, it's gone. They weren't your fans, they weren't sticking around, they were just playing that playlist passively in the background on shuffle. And so Spotify, it's a fickle beast. I liked the idea of the strategy of teaching it where to place your music algorithmically, because I think a lot of the bigger artists pick up their listeners algorithmically and also those editorial playlists are in large part driven by algorithmic success. So they're not going to typically add a song that hasn't been performing well algorithmically. So yeah, it's like this mystery, everyone's trying to game Google SEO, or they were at least for 15 years, but that was a huge thing and no one knew that actual formula, but you had some clues. I think Spotify's a little bit like that.

Michael Walker:
Interesting. So there's a couple of points that you made there I think would be really helpful to dive into. One being once, let's say that someone does get on 10 different playlists on Spotify and they have all this traffic. I'd be curious if you have any thoughts or ideas on how do they actually build a deeper relationship with those people and take someone from a casual listener who doesn't really care that much to actually connecting with them. So I going to open up a loop without, I want to kind of circle back around to that. But before we get there, I would love to dig in a little bit to SubmitHub and really getting themselves on those playlists in the first place. So you mentioned how important it is to kind of seed the algorithm with the right nodes, the harmonies, so that you're kind of training it like this is who you suggest my music to. Don't put it to everybody. So gosh, I wish there was a platform that existed somewhere that you could use to connect with playlist owners and curators and SubmitHub is a platform where that's like the idea is-

Jason Grishkoff:
Where's my side camera angle. I want 

Michael Walker:
So I would love to hear just from your experience, maybe you could share a little bit about at this point, you've been around for a long time now and I'm sure you've seen people doing it right and having enormous success by doing it the right way. And you've probably also seen a lot of the common mistakes and where people miss the mark when they're using it. So I'd love to hear from your perspective, what are some of the best practices for using SubmitHub? Like what do you recommend, right, let's say that someone's listening to this right now and they have a new EP that is going to be coming out in a month or two, or they just released it now they're ready to kind of get it placed. How do you recommend they start to really get the most out of the platform?

Jason Grishkoff:
Right. I've got a competitor who shall not be named, but their answer to this is spend more money, and they say the artists who have the most success are the ones who spend the most. And I won't do that. I don't do that. It's a sales pitch. I kind of come into it with the opposite. I think it's much smarter to come in with a smaller budget and one of the biggest mistakes I see are artists who land on SubmitHub thinking that, oh cool, this is going to be easy. All I have to do is send my song to a hundred playlisters and boom, I'm going to be Beyonce. Right? Huge mistake. Those are usually the guys who end up walking away saying, this is a scam, I spent a hundred dollars, I'm supposed to be big like Beyonce. What's going on? Personally,
I think when you're promoting your music, there are many different avenues you can go. There are a lot of gurus out there on YouTube who will teach you different techniques for promoting your music from Instagram ads to hustling DMs to Twitter to whatever, Twitch, to scam playlists. It's all out there. And I'm a big believer in the fact that you really need to play it from as many angles as you can. So people have asked me to come up with case studies or tell me some of the success stories from SubmitHub, like name an artist who's made it big. And the answer is that I don't have any, I can't name any because that's not the way it works. You cannot singularly get big from one approach anymore, it just doesn't work. So there are artists who have leveraged SubmitHub very well to support all of their ongoing promotion. And this can come from many different angles, not just playlists.
So music blogs still actually adds some value here, not because they're going to expose you to a lot of listeners, but because they're going to help you build your resume so to speak. And I think most people refer to that as your EPK, your electronic press kit. But this is effectively a one sheet that you as an artist will be able to leverage throughout your career when you're trying to get booked for shows or pitch to a label or anything like that. And blogs can be important there because they allow you to put little quotes on there. That's a little bit of social proof that someone's written about you, Indie Shuffle says this is the greatest song to come out this week, boom, great quote, put it on there. Another thing that blogs can help you do is they help you populate your Google feed and make it look a little bit more wholesome.
So let's say you're a new artist, you come out, you put your song out through district here and that's it. You might find that song populates Google through all those various different streaming platforms, but that's not necessarily good content to have up there if someone is looking up your name and wants to find out more about you or verify whether you are worth booking. So music blogs are cool because it's called evergreen content. They stick around for a long time. Typically music blogs don't take the content offline, you write a blog post, it stays up. Our stuff from Indie Shuffle from 2007 is still up there, still on Google, still accessible. So music blogs are a cool part of that strategy because they help you build that sort of resume, so to speak. And you do actually typically get people writing about your music and that's something that I think can be special to many artists.
So step one, when you're coming on and submitting, I think there is still value in going to some of these music blogs. And so I would recommend trying to identify a few that strongly align with your genre and your taste. And you'll see on SubmitHub, we have something called a genre match. So you can identify the curators who align pretty closely with you, send your song off to 10 of them, hope for two or three blog posts, maybe even more. Boom, you got that. Okay. And then now you got to move on to your vanity metrics. There's a bit of your Spotify. So we touched on the idea of teaching Spotify where you should land. If you are a completely fresh artist and they don't have that information, they're going to need some sort of signals, and these early playlist ads are the things that are going to send those signals.
Even if it's five or 10 listeners, trying to get that lined up with the right group of people who you want to essentially represent you on Spotify is crucially important. Once you're a more established artist, that's not necessarily as important. I think Spotify at that point you've released 5, 10, 15 songs, they kind of know where you fall, who they should recommend you to and the release radar, that type of stuff. So the vanity metric one, oh man, it's tricky because Spotify does pay almost $4 for a thousand streams, which is actually a really good internet rate in terms of advertising. It beats all advertising these days. It's one of the best paying things on the internet, even though it sounds pretty terrible. It's actually really good. And so you do earn a little bit of money, but you'll find that when you go through sites like SubmitHub and Playlist Push and Groover, when you get added to these playlists, you're typically only looking at between 50 to 200 listeners per ad and you're probably not going to make your money back explicitly from it.
So again, you've got the angle of teaching Spotify where you should fall, but then there is a bit of the vanity metrics. You don't want to have your people open up your profile and see that dreaded less than 1000 plays on a song. You want to try to get some traction there if you're going to book a show or get book signed to a record label. So again, I would then focus on 10 to 20 Spotify playlists who are within that niche.
So the takeaway here is that the big error I see people do is they come in and they just sort of spray and pray, to use a computer gaming term, whereas I think the more successful ones are far more targeted in it and then they go and they say, okay, cool, that took me 20 minutes on SubmitHub, now I'm going to spend the rest of my time focusing on the music video I'm doing or getting ready for this gig I'm going to play live. Or there are so many angles you have to tackle it from as an artist today that the idea in my head is that SubmitHub should just be a service on the side that you plug in, boom, fire that off, hope something happens. If it doesn't, keep moving. That's like you're throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks and SubmitHub is just a tasty noodle. Yeah.

Michael Walker:
Awesome. Yeah, lots of really good stuff in there. So it sounds like what you're saying is that one of the first things to do is to consider submitting to maybe 10 or so blogs if you want a couple of blog placements and that there's a benefit. The first thing that popped to mind as you were describing that was watching TV and a commercial comes on for a new movie, and I don't know about you, but when I see the commercial happening and then it starts flashing across the screen, five out of five stars or this was a breathtaking experience or best movie of the year. Yeah, that makes a really big impact. And so it sounds like, you can use those blog placements, you can use some of those quotes for things that you put on your website. Even just a place in Google so someone searches you.

Jason Grishkoff:
Yeah. You can even pull them from the feedback you get. So let's say you get rejected by Indie Shuffle, Hey really love this song, the guitars at the chorus where epic and I love the way they played together, but the lead vocalist I struggled to get into, drop the lost part, put the pot about the guitars in your press quote, boom, you just made lemonade out of lemons. Right?

Michael Walker:
That's awesome. In my mind I was imagining this song was absolute trash, I hated it. But then if you turn it like this was the greatest. But that doesn't sound like that's what you recommend. It's just taking the good true pieces and then being able to showcase those. Awesome.

Jason Grishkoff:
Most curators try to write what we call a compliment sandwich, and we don't even necessarily coach them to do this, but the approach we want them to take when they're declining the song is to A, say something that proves you listened. So say something specific about the song, not a generic statement. Hey, really loved your song, actually let the artist know you listened. And then B, let them know why it's not a good fit. And most of them take that A part to be the compliment and they come in with something really positive. In fact, sometimes the issues we have is people being like, Hey, thanks for sending your song. This is the loveliest thing I've ever heard. It's amazing. I'm going to play it at my sister's wedding. Declined. Dude, why was it declined? And so then we go and we coach those. We've actually put a lot of effort in this year into coaching curators to common mistakes to avoid. So that one doesn't come up as often, but that used to be pretty common one on Twitter, like love your song, decline. Without actually saying why it's declined.

Michael Walker:
Yeah.

Jason Grishkoff:
Anyway. Yeah. Compliments sandwich, take a compliment, turn it into some PR.

Michael Walker:
Yeah, I mean that's really valuable life advice too, I think for everyone listening, just like how do you deliver constructive feedback in a nice way? That compliment sandwich idea of yeah, you lead with something that's a nice compliment, something you really like and then you kind of deliver, the stuff can be kind of sensitive and then you end it with another compliment or another thing that you really like.

Jason Grishkoff:
Yeah.

Michael Walker:
It really is a special way to be able to present feedback and a loving kind of way.

Jason Grishkoff:
Another important approach or useful one is to keep it subjective rather than objective. So in that example I gave, rather than saying the vocalist kind of sucked, you would say, well I struggled to connect with the vocalist personally. So there's a slight differentiation in the way that you put it. And I think that emphasis on the fact that hey, music is subjective and just because I don't like it doesn't mean others won't, but here's why I don't like it. That it can sort of soften the blow a little bit. Yeah.

Michael Walker:
That definitely makes sense. Cool. So let's swing back around to that open loop that we open up a little bit around Spotify as a platform and maybe a disconnect between the listeners. How do we bridge the gap? How do we build an actual authentic connection with those fans? It's not just streaming in the background but actually people who might come out to shows or actually be supportive. I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on just the current lay of the land right now, what are some ways that someone can build more of that authentic connection?

Jason Grishkoff:
Yeah, I personally am not sure that Spotify is a good way to do that. It lacks the localization that you need. So if you are a musician who wants to perform live, Spotify's actually probably one of the worst ways to promote your music. It's good again for that vanity metric, making sure that your Spotify looks like it's actually got some action going on. It's that social proof people land on it. They don't think that they're crazy for liking your music and they get that confidence boost out of seeing that others are also liking it. But at the end of the day, you could pick up 50,000 listeners on Spotify and if you try to go on tour, none of them are going to be there, and it's for a couple reasons.
A, they're spread out through the whole world. B, they're not actually listening to you. That's the problem with the playlist. They're listening to the playlist, it's passive sort of thing. And C, Spotify doesn't really give you a good way to contact, not to my knowledge.

Michael Walker:
Right.

Jason Grishkoff:
I think they've got some advertising suites where you can sort of re target your listeners and people who've encountered your songs and keep hitting them up. Obviously Spotify is staunchly anti payola, so you're not allowed to pay for placement in a playlist. That's one of their policies. And so SubmitHub's approach is that you're not paying for your share, you're paying for the time spent considering the song. So that's how we don't fall foul of the rule that Spotify has. But ironically, they have an advertising program where you can pay to make your songs play next, which is not disclosed to the user. It's just, hey, that's the song that plays next. So it is-

Michael Walker:
Yeah. That's definitely the definition of it. Yeah.

Jason Grishkoff:
Yeah. And so Spotify auto enables this feature that if you listen to an album, they'll start playing similar stuff afterwards. I've got that disabled, but I bet you 90% of people don't. And in fact, controversially about six months ago in one of their software updates, they automatically enabled that option for all Chromecast and Sonos and streaming devices and they didn't provide an option to disable it, and three weeks later they quickly rolled out a patch for the people who were complaining to be like, okay, fine, there's an extra option now to disable it. But I think most people are just going onto what's next. And so Spotify does provide an advertising way to try and re target those people. And I think you can probably do that on a location basis.
So let's say that you are operating out of the Bay Area in California and you're trying to have some shows there, that's going to be one approach that you can take. I don't think a playlist pitching platform SubmitHub is really going to allow you, I mean I don't want to shoot my own product down here, but even playlist pitching doesn't help you target a specific region unless maybe you go find a playlist that's like Bay Area hip hop, but even then it's probably being listened to by a bunch of people who aren't in the Bay Area. So really if you are a musician trying to perform live, the best ways you can do it are by performing live. To start small and grow from there, people in the local community are going to see you and notice you and you grow from that. So those interpersonal connections. You can try Instagram advertising because that also allows you to really target in on a demographic by location, age, gender, sexual orientation, whatever the hell Facebook has, right?

Michael Walker:
Similar artists too.

Jason Grishkoff:
Yeah, similar artists. And in fact, actually a lot of our Spotify playlisters are keeping their playlists engaged and active with Instagram ads. It's probably the most common technique used because Spotify, they don't have any interest in promoting independent playlists. They're trying to push their own editorial playlists. So independent playlisters are constantly struggling to get engagement much in a way that that artists are as well. Yeah, I guess to answer your question, how do you leverage those playlists into those shows, it's really difficult and I don't think there is a straightforward path to it.

Michael Walker:
Yeah. Thank you for that answer. I feel like that was a very honest answer and I think we have similar views in terms of the platform and being able to, it's not like Spotify is evil or bad or you shouldn't use it. Clearly it's the number one platform for streaming songs, but it just seemed like there's a need for a way to build a deeper connection with those fans and not having access to be able to contact those fans that follow you on Spotify is challenging, but we should definitely catch up. So our street team platforms, basically we designed it to help make campaigns more effective when it comes to reaching new fans. The way that I look at, let's say Instagram advertising for example, is that it's really just a numbers game. And you'd probably appreciate this because you're a coder and you're probably good at math, but you really, advertising is just, it's two numbers.
It's like how much are you paying to acquire a new fan and how much are you earning per new fan that you bring in? And that's all that matters. And so if you're advertising and you're spending $5 to bring in a new fan and you make a dollar per fan, then it's just not going to keep working, it's not going to be sustainable and there's lifetime value and different things too. So it's just all about that balance, that scale. And if you're paying to stream for someone to string a song on Spotify and you get paid less than a penny per stream and most people don't even listen to the 30 seconds to get counted as a first stream. And some people may listen to 10 times. If they listen to a thousand times to that song, that'll be like 30 hours of, if it's a three minute song ish, 30 hours of non-stop streaming and you get paid $4 from someone listening for 30 non-stop hours to your song, which is a crazy amount of time to listen to.

Jason Grishkoff:
It would get flagged by Spotify as something fake and cancel out.

Michael Walker:
Right. So when I look at that, at least for advertising, in order for you to be able to have a profitable campaign going directly to Spotify, then you need to pay less than half a penny per stream, not even per click. And there's ways that you can spend 50 cents per lead and make a dollar or $2 per lead, but it's not by going to Spotify directly. So there's probably some cool stuff for us to be able to connect on related to the street team software and maybe building an API connection with playlist with SubmitHub. It's something, we'll be able to geek out and kind of explore some stuff but-

Jason Grishkoff:
Mush it over your head and see. But yeah, I mean I playlist, they shouldn't be used as a way to grow a local fan base. They should be used for other things. And there's some artists who don't care about a local fan base. I mean, if you're making lo-fi hip-hop beats, there's a good chance you're never actually going to be playing a show anyway. You just kind of want to make music in your pajamas and rely on streaming revenue. And people do that. They do totally fine there. So it's different strokes for different folks.

Michael Walker:
Absolutely. Yeah, that's a really good point. One point that you've brought up was about how if you want to get started being able to play shows and draw folks out to shows, then you want to start connecting with the people that are already doing that, that are already going out to shows, rather than trying to convince someone who doesn't really go out to shows normally and doesn't really resonate that much with their music. That's going to be way more difficult to get someone like that out to your show than just finding the people who are already going out to shows near you that are already supporting artists that have this inertia. They already have momentum and then instead of having to try to convince someone to do something that they don't really want to do, you're just connecting with the people who already get value from it and showing up for them.

Jason Grishkoff:
Yeah. Maybe one strategy there is to open up for other acts.

Michael Walker:
A hundred percent. I mean that's a tale as old as time for touring artists is opening up for similar artists as long as it can draw a fan base. Cool man. Well hey, let's get ready to wrap up for today. But this has been awesome and I appreciate, hopefully for people who are listening to this right now, I super enjoyed the part where we were geek out of like API stuff and then hopefully other people who are listening can I see the benefits or planting the seeds of, because really what that's about is connecting you with the right people who are going to resonate with your music. And if they have followers who resonate with your music as well, then that's a huge asset. But for anyone who's listening to this right now who is interested in exploring SubmitHub and kind of launching a campaign, what's the best place for them to go to get started?

Jason Grishkoff:
Well, submithub.com. Should be pretty straightforward. I mean, I've tried to make it as simple as possible and it should be fairly self-explanatory, especially if you've listened to this podcast. But it's a good way to go. I mean, you just go there and follow the steps. It's pretty straightforward. Upload your song, choose who you want to send to, boom, done. There's not too much more complexity than that.

Michael Walker:
Yeah. Awesome. Well yeah, like always we're going to put the links in the show notes, but it's pretty straightforward, go type in submithub.com. So thank you so much for taking the time to be here and share-

Jason Grishkoff:
Thanks for having me, man.

Michael Walker:
Some lessons and insights, what you've learned. Also just for the platform in general, it feels like just based on our conversation, you have a very transparent, authentic voice. So thank you for sharing that and not trying to blow things up out of proportion or try to, I don't know, one of the things you had mentioned was over hyping, right? Setting good expectations I think is really helpful for the music community. So thanks again for taking the time.

Jason Grishkoff:
Cool. Thanks for having me.

Michael Walker:
Hey, it's Michael here. I hope that you got a ton of value at its episode. Make sure to check out the show notes to learn more about their guests today. And if you want to support the podcast, then there's a few ways to help us grow. First, if you hit subscribe, then that'll make sure you don't miss a new episode. Secondly, if you share it with your friends or on your social media and tag us after, that really helps us out. And third, best of all, if you leave us an honest review, it's going to help us reach more musicians like you who want to take the music career to the next level. The time to be a modern musician is now. And I look forward to seeing you on our next episode.