Jason Grishkoff is the founder of SubmitHub. One of the key stages of getting your music heard and promoted outside of your own network is accessing the world’s music curators, but who are they? How can artists and creators access these curators and influencers themselves? This is what SubmitHub and Jason are expert in.
“I didn't know anything about the music industry. I didn't know that there were publicists trying to push stuff. I was clueless. So getting emails at the start was really cool, especially when it was from artists that I recognized.”
Our guest on today’s episode is Jason Grishkoff the founder of SubmitHub. With just a hop, skip and a jump, Jason moved from the world of high finance to working at tech giant Google. Then a side hustle and hobby – the Indie Shuffle Blog (it’s music discovery powered by real people.), led to founding SubmitHub. The goal was to efficiently and transparently connect artists with curators, the “right” people, in order to get music heard more efficiently.
One of the key stages of getting your music heard and promoted outside of your own network is accessing the world’s music curators, but who are they? How can artists and creators access these curators and influencers themselves? This is what SubmitHub is an expert in. The platform was built with musicians and curators in mind. You upload your music, then use pay-for credits to submit it to trusted and user-scored curators (there is a free song-submission feature as well). They listen and then respond directly from within the SubmitHub platform.
Byta’s Marc Brown has always tried to impart as much wisdom as possible to anyone wanting to operate within the music ecosystem. DIY is your best first step, finding out how everything works, by trying and often failing for the first time. There are no shortcuts. This was a great conversation between two people trying to do similar things in different ways.
Jason spoke to us from Cape Town, South Africa
Show Notes:
#HowWeListen Live: In Conversation
00:10 - Byta.com
03:15 - NAPSTER
03:57 - 2007 music
07:54 - Indie Shuffle
09:00 - MP3 Blogs
09:40 - Web Sheriff
13:18 - The advantage of a publicist
17:36 - SubmitHub explained
21:23 - Solving the problem of email inconsistency
25:33 - Hype Machine
27:38 - Knowing who you are and what you want as an artist
33:30 - How to approach advertising your music
39:00 - Who should I send my music to?
43:03 - How to take advantage of playlists
48:32 - The difference between followers and listeners
55:46 - Playlist pitfalls
58:35 - Pay for playlisting/fake playlists
1:01:00 - What else is an artist to do?
1:03:00 - TikTok
1:06:00 - Take Spotify out for drinks, if you can find them
1:08:00 - Get as much traction in your first 28 days as possible
1:12:00 - Byta.com
Music by Fin Productions and Oliver Lyu