Over the years, I've heard a number of busy professionals say: "The concept is SubmitHub is cool, but it takes too much time. Can't you just choose for me?"
Well yes, now we can.
Today, we're rolling out a new feature that takes the work out of selecting curators, using the abundant data we have available at our fingertips. I won't call it "AI" or "web learning" or anything gimmicky like that - it's just a little bit of code I wrote. But I do think it has the potential to make SubmitHub much easier to use for newcomers and busy people alike.
After you've followed the normal submission steps (choosing a song and selecting your genres), you'll be presented by a list of all the available curators with a big purple button at the top.
Clicking this button will ask you to let us know what's most-important to you when it comes to getting "results" from your submission.
These combinations are used together and are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
Listeners: We'll focus on Spotify Playlisters and YouTube channels, as well as any curators with an engagement score > 6/10. The idea here is that you want more ears on your song.
Written blog posts: There's still a significant demand for original written content, particularly among publicists and labels. Prioritizing this option means we'll focus on those in our Really Good Bloggers group.
Feedback: Focusing on curators with feedback that's consistently rated positively by artists.
The philosophy behind this one is driven by Dylan's article about "Playing SubmitHub like the Stock Market." Some curators are way pickier than others, and not everyone enjoys that.
We'll take your budget and your filters and pre-select a number of curators for you, with an emphasis on "Genre Match".
Everything from that point on functions the same way a submission always has. You've got your selections, so you can now review them, add or remove a couple, and hit "Submit" at the end.
Tada!
Maybe, maybe not. It's hard to know exactly how many people will use this feature, and whether it'll shift the mix of recipients. What I can say is that this algorithm relies heavily on the sorting mechanics that have already been present on the site for years now (eg, genre match and engagement). Focusing on these metrics means better "alignment" for submitters and higher quality song submissions for curators. I'm sure we'll improve it over time, which is one of the fun things about running this website :)