Do you ever feel like your music is up there with the big artists, and all you have to do to get to their level is to submit your music to the right people?
Well, if this is the case, then you’ve came to the right place.
Today we will teach you how to make sure your music gets in the right hands. And by this we mean showing your music to the people who have the power to expose it to your target audience.
It can be confusing with all these labels, platforms, and blogs nowadays. You risk wasting valuable hours sending your music to the wrong person.
Not to mention, even if you find the right person to send it to, you may never get a response.
But don’t worry. In this article, we’ll be giving you the correct tools to professionally submit your tracks, get your music heard, and potentially get your first single signed to a label!
But before we go ahead and reveal these 13 essential places you can submit your music to, we need to go over the correct etiquette for music submission.
Let’s get started!
Before Submitting Your Music
Produce Quality Music
Before you start worrying about which blogs to submit to or how to describe your track to capture the attention of an A&R (Artist & Repertoire), you need to have great, professionally polished music to showcase.
Making sure that your music is up there with the producers who are killing the game is the most important element.
A&Rs can distinguish if a track is produced professionally in the first three to five seconds.
Therefore, your success at getting an email back is proportional to the quality of your music.
And the thing is, if you keep sending great music, your name will become familiar, and they might even look forward to more of your submissions in the future.
So take your time to carefully improve your craft until you feel like you sound is about 80% as good as your favorite artists.
If it’s not there yet, don’t waste any time submitting your music to blogs and labels. Especially because first impressions are crucial.
Instead, use your time effectively to improve your production.
Build A Database
Before you can submit your track, you must first figure out where and who to submit your track to!
But where could you possibly get all this information from?
Well, it’s actually quite simple. All you have to do is keep an eye out on who is talking about other producers and on what platform they’re sharing this news on.
For example, if you’ve just read an article about Martin Garrix’s new single, hunt down the blogger and save all the information you can find.
Or if you’re in love with everything that Bitbird releases and dream of signing one of your tracks to them, write down their submission email, which artists they release, which characteristics they look for in tracks, and who their A&Rs are.
And the good news is, you can start building your database of this information way before you’re actually ready to turn in your music.
In fact, if you start early, you’ll save yourselfso much time down the road!
Here’s all valuable information that you should store in your personal database:
- First and Last name
- Type of Publication (label/blog/YouTube..)
- Role/Position
- Personal Email Address
- Submission Email/Link
- What Kind of Music They Cover
- Are They Listed on Hypem? (we will talk more about this later)
- Website Link
- Social Media Links
- When You First Reached Out
- Who Did You Get in Contact With
- Response
- Additional Comments
We personally recommendusing
Google Sheetsto track this information, as it is easy and always backed up online. You could also share it with a few of your trusted producer friends, so you can all benefit and grow the list faster.
Here are two templates you can use as reference: one for blogs and one for labels.
It’s imperative that you regularly update your database.This will save you valuable time in the future when you need to submit your track to the right channel or label.
You should build a database for all potential platforms: blogs, labels, SoundCloud Channels, YouTube Channels, Spotify playlists, music libraries,and so on.
Do Your Research
Your database could easily start getting massive.
So, to narrow down the results and increase your chances of getting an email back, you should research which channels will appreciate and expect music in your style and genre.
Don’t send a Future Bass track to a Deep House label. That’s just a waste of your time and theirs.
How To Pitch
The time has finally come to send your first email to blogs and labels.
You feel like your music is bringing something new to the table,and you’re ready for the world to discover you!
So now, the next crucial aspect that will come into play is writing a professional email to pitch your track.
Your emailneedsto be short, concise, informative,and personal (in a professional manner).
Take a look at thetemplate email below. It was sent for a premiere request on Dancing Astronaut, which fell through.You can
find the song here.
As you can see, the email is informal and personal to the person he is sending it to, but yet professional and concise.
He provided all of the essential informationabout the release and a private listening link. This was also sent 11 days before the official release date, which gave the blog enough time to get back and coordinate the premiere.
Here are some other elements you could include in your email:
- Always address the person using their first name
- If you had any previous business with this person, write a line to bring up whatever you worked on together, so they remember you.
- Never attach big files to the email. Always send streaming links (SoundCloud or Dropbox are preferred)
- Be polite
- Get straight to the point and don’t include pointless information.
- Have a professional looking signature (include any social media links)
- Check your spelling!
If you’resubmitting music to labelsyou should also keep these tipsin mind:
- Do NOT attach your demo directly to the email
- Do NOT send unfinished work
- Send your track only through private SoundCloud link and a download option (Dropbox or WeTransfer)
- Briefly introduce and describe the track you’re sending (artist info, your style, past releases, future plans, why you think this track fits the label)
- Don’t be too pushy or come off as entitled
- Be polite and professional
When To Pitch
- For Blogs
Timing all your steps when pitching a track is something that is not as easy as you might think.
We recommend sending your first pitch 10 to 14 days before the official release date (this is specific to blog premieres and exclusives).
If they don’t respond, send a polite follow up 5-7 days after the initial email.
If they don’t get back to you, still remind them on release day that your track is officially out.
For all other blog coverage, you should send your email the day it comes out, along with all streaming links for SoundCloud and Spotify.
- For Labels
Pitching your track to labels is quite a different story.
This timeline follows the progress of the track you want to submit. Especially at the beginning of your career,we suggest only submitting fully mixed and mastered tracks.Therefore, the chances of getting heard are higher.
Later on in your career, when you have already established solid relationships with the label A&Rs and a strong reputation as an artist, you can manage to send them tracks that are almost done.
But for now, only send tracks when they’re 100percentdone.
Now that you know how to submit your track, let’s go over where to submit your track to.
13 Places Where You Can Submit Your Music
1. Blogs
Music blogs still stand on top of the leaderboard as places to discover new artists and gain credibility in the industry.
Getting your first few publications on blogs like
Dancing Astronaut,
YourEDM,
NestHQ,or
EARMILKcan make you achieve significant traction amongst producers and fans.
These websites mostly covernews in the EDM world but also write exclusive premieres and reviews of new music.
Blogs such as
Run The Trapcan get traffic of up to 1 million visitors per month!
Butwhat is the best way to actually get a hold of the blogger?
We recommend to always go for the personal interaction with the bloggers. Your chances to have your music considered are much higher this way.
You first need to identify which writers would cover your type of music. You can do this by googling other reference artists and where they have been covered.
Let’s say your track is stylistically comparable to Illenium. By searching “Illenium review,” a list of numerous blogs that have covered his music through the years will appear.
Among the first few hits, the blog from EDM Identity was the most detailed. This means the blogger loved the album, and could potentially be interested in yours!
Right below the title, the name of the blogger is in plain sight. If there wasno link, you would go back to Google and look her up on other social media sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, or Snapchat.
Lucky for us, the writer had her own page on the website.
This is a solid way for you to get to know the writer better, understand who her favorite artists are, and obtain contact information to reach out to her through email. Sometimes email addresses are included in these pages. However, in this instance, we found a direct link to her private Facebook.
Don’t be afraid to add her and send her a message! Just remember the guidelines we talked about earlier in this article about how to pitch your music.
Apart from personal blogger contacts, all these sites have a general or submission email that you can find in their “About” or “Contact” tab.
2. Hype Machine Blogs
Hype Machine is a website that ranks new and upcoming tracks based on a few things.
The first metric is how many blogs write about that specific track. They also look at how many hearts (which is the equivalent of a like) the track has and the blog’s follower base.
Many industry professionals, labels, and A&Rs look at which tracks are popular to understand what’s trending and who the next rising star will be.
This means that if you’re trying to get discovered, you may want to aim to get your track posted on Hype Machine.
But more than that, this website actually shows you exactly which blogs you should be reaching out to.
In fact, Hype Machine is “la crème de la crème” of music blogs.
This is because, each track on this site includes a list of all the blogs that have mentioned the track or even posted the track.
And the best part is, these blogs are carefully handpicked by the staff, and they firmly decline any sites that have commercial interests.
So you can rest assured that all the blogs on this site are legit. This means the only thing you have to worry about at this point is figure out which blogs would be the best to reach out to.
To do so, first find which tracks are similar to yours and then look at which blogs posted about them. This will let you know which sites are interested in your particular style and genre, making your outreach very targeted.
To find these similar tracks, you can
browse through all of themby “Categories & Genres,”or “Countries.”
Then, once you find the blogs you want to talk to, justlook up the blogger’s contact infoand message them based on the “how to pitch” guidelines.
3. Spotify Playlist Submission Forms
Big playlist curators and the main blogs who own a major playlist on Spotify all have submission forms where you can submit your music.
To find these submission forms, you need to do some digging around, especially on Instagram.Let us give you an example.
It’s commonplace now for artists to shout out curators for including their new tracks on Spotify playlists. By following big electronic music artists, you often come across one particular name:
Austin Kramer.
Former programmer for SiriusXM’s BPM, Electric Area, and Tiesto’s Club life, he’s now Spotify’s dance music curator. If there’s one person in the electronic music industry that holds power to control what becomes famous, it’s him.
He manages all the biggest electronic music playlists.
To efficiently manage all these playlists weekly, he created “mint.” This stands for “multi-directional incubation tool.”
This means there is a meritocracyto how your music climbs to make it to the top. Meaning a young artist can’t expect to be placed in the biggest playlist right off the bat.
If your music is good enough, you’ll be placed in one of the smaller playlists to begin with, and after few more quality releases, you’ll start making your way into the more followed ones.
All these playlists are divided by genre or mood.
The great thing is that it is open to anyone to submit,and if you follow all steps correctly you might make it there one day!
The only problem is that if you send your track through any other platform, they will most likely reject it.
If you head over to the
submit form linkwe found on Twitter, all details are listed on how to correctly send through your music.
Other platforms and blogs also have their own submission forms.
To name a few:
- Filtr(Sony’s playlists)
4. Playlist Curators
Tracking down the curators might increase the chances of them listening to your track, as this is a more personal approach.
However, the process of finding them and engaging in a conversation is a little trickyand requires some detective work.
Let me give you a few examples:
First of all, you need to identify which playlists are hot right now and include the artists that are most similar to your style.
Let’s just say you’re in love with ILIVEHERE.’s new track on bitbird’s new compilation.
Head over to the artist’s page and click on the “About” tab.
Then, under “Discovered On,” you’ll see a list of playlists that are giving the artist the most listeners.
After evaluating the number of followers and number of songs in these playlists, try and identify the ones that are independently owned (not the ones managed by Spotify or labels).
These are the ones that will most likely be willing to post your track.
If there’s no information on how to contact them on their personal profile, head over to Google.
Typically the keywords we search for are “username” + spotify/email/name of playlist.
In this case, we couldn’t find a direct email, but the links on his SoundCloud lead us to a Submithub submission page (which we will discuss more in-depth later).
If you fall short of finding an email, don’t be afraid to add them on social media.
Engage in a conversation, introduce yourself,and tell them how much you love their “x” playlist. Suggest that one your tracks could fit well in that playlist, and if they show interest in it, send it over to them.
Another great example is the way we found Apple Music electronic music curator’s email.
He is the man managing all electronic music playlists on Apple Music!
This time we found him on Instagram, going through stories of renowned artists.
We noticed Jauz tagging a certain @robbyenge, thanking him for including his latest track on an Apple Music dance music playlist.
We did some digging around, and his submission email was in plain sight on the profile.
It’s all about paying attention to the details and tracking down the right people.
5. Labels
Signing a track to Spinnin’ Records, OWSLA, and Monstercat is whatall producers dream of.
They’re also the hardest places to get released on, and the standards they have are very high. Because of this,you should avoid sending them your unreleased music, especially at the beginning of your career.
These labels operate as businesses and make moves based on what will generate the mostrevenue. Therefore, they only sign artists that fit their brand, produce amazing music, have a big fan base, and hold marketing power.
However, this shouldn’t demotivate you. Use it as motivation and work hard to climb the ladder to reach those labels.
When your music is amazing and you’ve had a good number of quality releases on other reputable labels, the chances are, they will contact you directly! They’re always on the hunt for new talent.
But tofirstbe considered for their talent pool, you need to have a lot of quality releases behind you.
So how do you approach these labels to releaseyour next track?
Well, you submit your track using three options: find their general submission email, a submission form, or contact their A&R (which we will talk about in the next section).
Here are a few examples:
Lowly Palace, a new heavyweight independent label, doesn’t have any contact info on their
websiteor
SoundCloud. However, by digging around on
Facebook, you can find it.
For San Holo’s label “Bitbird,” it works a bit differently. By going to their SoundCloud page, they have a direct link that redirects you to a demo submission form on their website.
By following these simple guidelines, you are able to submit your brand new demos to them.
But you shouldn’t worry if you don’t get a response back. These labels get hundreds of submissions every day and don’t have the time to respond to every single producer. Keep trying if you’re confident that your music fits the style they’re looking for.
Typically, the smaller a label is, the higher the chances are of finding submission emails and contacts. However, for the big ones, it’s possible that they don’t have any public contact info. In this case, you would have to find an A&R directly.
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6. A&R
Most labels have A&Rs (Artist & Repertoire) working for them. These are the ones who go through the demo submissions and deal with artists directly. They’re the so-called talent scouts.
Fortunately, with the amount of information available at our fingertips on the web and social media, it’s pretty easy to discover who these people are.
The most straightforward way to get started is looking on Google. Simply type“label name + A&R.”
With only one search,we were able to discover the names of two A&Rs, the contact email of one of the two, and a
websitethat contains many other contact information.
Another super powerful free tool to discover emails is this Google Chrome plugin called
Hunter. It scans through the website’s cache for email addresses.
We tested it on Dim Mak’s website. In just a few seconds we figured our the email address for demo submissions, potential names of A&R’s, and other employees of the label. With those names, you can go back to Google or LinkedIn to find out what their role is within Dim Mak.
It’s very important that you trace these emails back to the original source to understand who the right person to contact is. Don’t email all of them as it’s not professional.
After you have identified your person of interest, either send them an email using the guidelines we talked about earlier or start following them on socialmediato get to know them.
The trick to set yourself apart from the other producers who are trying to get in contact with them is to interact with them constantly. Share your thoughts when they publish something on Twitter or Instagram. Genuinely show interest in what they do and the music they share.
Give them something of value like ideas, new interesting articles about trends in the music industry,or the latest Spotify updates.
Sometimes they even reach out to their followers to ask for help in discovering new talent but avoid sending them your own music in those cases. Be patient and give it time.
After you fostered this relationship and friendship, they will naturally become more interested in learning more about you and your music. It will feel a lot more natural to share your music with them.
7. SubmitHub
SubmitHub
is one of the best new platforms in the industry to submit your music.
This service allows you to submit unreleased or published music to labels, blogs, and playlists for a chance to get signed, reviewed, or included in a playlist.
This platforms is very user-friendly and has simplified the process of submitting music to blogs and labels. It alsoincreasesyour chances of receiving feedback on your track.
Each channel also has their own page with the important information you should scout before submitting.
As you can see, the blog gives clear guidelines on what kind of music they like to receive, as well as what you should expect in case you get accepted. On the top left, you also get useful stats about their reach on the multiple socials and channels they own.
It works for both labels and blogs with free and paid options. You can find the full list of indexed channels at
this link. Actively, there's 386 blogs and labels who use the service. A total of 2,483,730 submissions have been sent through SubmitHub, with an average response rate of 73%.
The free option consists of submitting music using standard credits. These are limited to two every four hours (onesubmission = onecredit in most cases. Bigger blogs sometimes require two). The feedback rate is also much lower when you use this option.
If you want to drastically increase your chances of being listened and reviewed, you should use premium credits. These cost anywhere from $6 to $80.
Here’s the complete breakdown:
We recommend investing in some credits if you want to send your track to multiple blogs at once. Even if you don’t get reviewed or signed, you can still get much value out of from it.
Here’s how:
If you use premium credits, the blog has the incentive to respond within 48 hours to gain $0.50 from the submission. If they decline, they have to provide a feedback of at least 20 words. If they don’t meet these requirements, your credit is refunded, and they don’t get paid.
SubmitHub is the only platform that gives bloggers and labels an incentive to listen to your submissions.
Don’t wait to
submit your first track!
8. Artist Intelligence
AIA (Artist Intelligence Agency) is a unique matrix of several record labels that utilizes a personal portal for submissions.
Some of the labels they own have millions of SoundCloud followers, and you can check out the full link by clicking “Show More” on their
official SoundCloud profile.
To submit music, it’s a straightforward process.
Sign up on their portaland submit your track. Make sure to pick the right genre to increase the likelihood of being accepted.
9. YouTube Channels
YouTube Channels still play a key role to music producers, as theplatform canreach millions of people and new potential fans.
YouTube gets over 30 million visitors per day, and almost 5 billion videos are watched every single day!
The people who own big channels on YouTube have the same power as Spotify curator or labels when it comes to making an artist popular.
Just look at some of the numbers on these famous YouTube Music Channels:
- NCS(13M subscribers)
- Trap City(8.6M subscribers)
- Mr. Suicide Sheep(7.6M subscribers)
- UKF Dubstep(6.1M subscribers)
- Proximity(5.3M subscribers)
- The Sound You Need(4.2M subscribers)
- Majestic Casual(3.6M subscribers)
- CloudKid(1.6M subscribers)
Don’t let these numbers scare youthough.Submitting music to them is easier than you think! Most of the time their contacts are hiding in plain sight!
Let’s take Proximity as an example. On the “About” tab on YouTube, there’s a link that redirects you to a demo submission page through
Toneden.
However, if you want to dig deeper, under “Details” - “ For business inquiries,” there’s a hidden email address of the page’s owner.
If none of these two options come up on the page, you can adopt another tactic using
Hunterto find the personal emails of the owners.
Here’s how:
On
Trap City’s YouTube channel, we were able to identify the names of the two founders and a general email. Typically, general inquiry emails receive tons of random messages and spam daily, so your submission will most likely get lost or deleted.
Instead, you can head over to their website and activate Hunter. Look through the results for the name that matches the ones previously found on YouTube. In this case, it matches the name of one of the two founders!
Emailing him directly will drastically increase your chances of getting a response.
10. SoundCloud Repost Channels
Reposting is still a very powerful wayto get your music to a bigger audience and gain new fans.
For the new producers who are reading this, reposting is the process of sharing a track on another SoundCloud profile. Here’s what it looks like:
There are multiple ways to achieve effective reposts:
- Trade reposts with your producer friends and support each other. This is the best way to grow together and help each other out.
- Send your track to smaller repost channels. A lot of channels repost music for free. In exchange, they might ask to be included in your download gate.
- The big promotional SoundCloud now chargesmoney for a repost on their platforms. Usually, there are different packages and the bigger their reach is, the more you will have to pay. And the crazy part, it’s not even guaranteed that you’ll be reposted.
The channels that do accept submissionstypically do it through Direct Message on SoundCloud or through personal submission portals like Aux London for example.
Once they review your track, you’ll get an email back saying whether you have been accepted or not.
In the case that you have succeeded, they will share with you their current plans to chose from (if they require payment) and how to follow through with the repost.
If you want to learn more about how to effectively dominate SoundCloud reposts, you should check out
The SoundCloud Bible.
11. Personal Handout through USB
This is the most underrated method to submit music, but it’s one of the most effective!
Imagine you just bought tickets to see Don Diablo perform at your local club next weekend. He is one of your inspirations. And at the same time, you produce amazing Future House tracks that resemble the sound he looks for when signing new tracks to his label
Hexagon.
What a perfect occasion to meet him directly and hand him a USB with your music on it. Remember to introduce yourself first, let him know what you do, and that he’s been such an inspiration to you. Explain why he should check out your track and what makes it special!
This way he’ll be a lot more keen to check the USB’s content during a long flight orwhen he has some down time. And when he does, he will remember exactly who you are.
Make sure the USB includesa couple of unreleased tracks and two or three of your best releases in case he wants to check out more of your music.
It is crucial that you include tracks that are 100% finished. Don’t include any rough demos.
As far as buying USBs, you can
buy a pack of flash driveson Amazon for pretty cheap.
12. Music Libraries
If you think yourcalling when it comes to producing is composing music for movies, ads, radio, video games, and websites, then music libraries should be your go-to.
Music Libraries are catalogs of music available for professionals in need of legal, cleared music to license.
Whenever you hear background music in movies, commercials, or even video games, chances are that they have been picked from a stock library. These are not tracks released on labels that you could hear on the radio or Spotify. They are custom made based on what the library requested of that artist.
If you want to apply to sell your music on these libraries, you need to have an extensiveresume of quality music. You also need to have a private folder of custom music to show them how versatile you can be. And it’s a plus if you released on any labels.
You may actually want to consider this since music libraries are one of the best revenue stream options for musicians and producers, as licensing tracks can
generate quite a lot of money.
But before you start applying, it’s very important that you take your time to research which libraries are reputable and could be a good fit for you.
Luckily, we’ve already done the heavy lifting for you with a list of the best ones in the industry!
Here’s some of them:
Information on how to sell your media on these websites is usually at the bottom of the homepage, sodon’t be afraid to reach out to them through email!
13. Podcasts & Radio Shows
Nowadays,most labels and famous artists have their own radio show/podcast, available on SoundCloud, iTunes and other podcast friendly websites.
This is a place for artists to showcase other artists of the label and support music from other talented producers in the industry. Most of them also have a designated “demo day track,” which they pick from the many submissions they receive every week!
Many producers have used this road to reach a bigger audience with their music, and sometimes they also secured a release with that same record label afterward!
Shows like Hardwell’s “
Hardwell On Air,” Don Diablo’s “
Hexagon Radio,” and Noisia’s “
Noisia Radio,” all play a demo track during the show.
Most of the time,emails to submit your tracks are on the SoundCloud profile, or they shout them out during the show,so keep your ears open!
Conclusion
Having the patience to wait before submitting your music to the world is very hard at the beginning of your musical journey.
However, this doesn’t mean that you can’t start planning ahead accordingly to learn all about blogs, labels, radio shows, and submission platforms.
To help you in this tricky and confusing process, we gave you this guide so youcanreference back to it when you’re building your PR Database or when the right time comes to finally submit your track to a label!
Remember to always act professionally and submit after you’ve done your research, you may justbe one submission away from being discovered!
Now it’s your time to tell us if you’ve had success submitting your music to some of these platforms.
Let us know in the comments below!