In a world where 100,000 songs are released every day, indie musicians face an uphill battle when it comes to finding new listeners. This becomes even harder when you don't have a marketing budget. Fortunately we've got a few tips to help you promote your music for free.
This is probably the first approach that comes to mind for many indie musicians: sending out emails or DMs on Instagram / Twitter.
Sometimes it works; however, from our experience, success is hard to come by (most of the genuine curators already use platforms like SubmitHub).
If someone does respond to your outreach, that's great! But be careful...
More often than not, the people who put a direct contact under their playlists will ask you for money or simply redirect you to a paid promotion site, meaning they may be fake playlists or at least shady. Keep in mind that paying for guaranteed placement is a violation of Spotify's terms, and you risk having your song removed from their platform.
Standard credits
You get 2 "standard" SubmitHub credits every 4 hours. These can be used for curators that accept them. We encourage SubmitHub curators to accept these credits, but ultimately it's optional for them (roughly 20% have it enabled).
With "standard" credits, your best approach is the same as with premium credits – focus on "Genre Match" scores of 7/10 or higher.
Pro tip: Don't send more than one song to one curator at the same time.
Ways to earn free premium credits
Through SubmitHub's "Hot or Not" feature, anybody can provide feedback on songs from other artists. By participating, you can earn a premium credit for every 20 ratings you leave for others (on top of the Hot or Not ratings you'll earn for your own songs).
The premium credit(s) you earn can be used to submit tracks to curators who aren't open to "standard" submissions, which means it's essentially a form of free music promotion. This provides a win-win situation where you can both receive feedback and possible blog coverage or playlist placement of your tune, and help others get their songs evaluated.
For every 10 feedbacks you provide, you'll get 7 ratings of your own song. People often save the songs to their own playlists right from Hot or Not – and you'll get valuable feedback from fellow artists.
SubmitHub's chatrooms are space for artists to network, share experiences, find opportunities, give their opinions, and gain valuable insights. Engaging with fellow artists in the community can lead to collaborations, feedback exchanges, and the opportunity to learn from others' experiences. It may be a small step in your music promotion, but you may find musicians sharing the same style and get on other's radars in a new way.
You've probably heard it already, but a social media presence is important. Posting about your music, your life, or anything you enjoy can bring an audience to you, but only do it if you actually enjoy what you're doing (it doesn't make any sense to dance on TikTok if you don't like doing that and your music is not danceable).
Think about who you are and what your potential audience might enjoy, and create content that is in line with that. Find your community (Reddit could work nicely for that as well), and talk about or share stuff that resonates with you as well as the people around you. Don't try to rush it and focus on regularity and consistency rather than being everywhere all the time – there is no quick success with this, but it is a free way to promote your music if done right.
There are, of course, many ways to approach building your fanbase on social media, and Andrew Southworth can inspire you with his video on how to use TikToks and reels for that purpose:
Promoting your music without a budget is challenging. But doing something is always better than doing nothing and expecting a miracle. Even one listener is a win for an indie artist, and with regular communication, promotional activities, and networking, you will slowly widen your reach and audience. Start with free submissions, network in the chatrooms, earn free premium credits with Hot or Not, add in a little bit of social media presence, and you've got a cheap-but-effective way of increasing your fanbase.