Over the years, we've worked hard to get SubmitHub's average approval rate from 10% in 2015-2020 up to the present-day 25%.
Here's how we did it:
The following article will go into a bit of detail, but if you prefer video to text, feel free to watch below!
When we started there were 5 genres (rock, hip-hop, electronic, folk, other). Today there are 225 genres.
By increasing the number of genres, we've allowed artists to hone in on the right targets.
We've also implemented tight controls on the number of genres that each curator can select. For example, a Spotify playlister is allowed to have a maximum of 15 genres per "active" playlist on their profile, and no more than 45 total. This means curators put more thought into which genres they're keen to curate rather than simply selecting all and "harvesting" credits within genres they'd never actually share.
In the last year or so we've added two additional elements that help get the right songs to the right curators:
If your song's moods overlap with a curator's mood preferences, they get a small boost to the score. Likewise, similar artist overlaps bump things up.
Feel free to read our in-depth article about the similar artists, published earlier this year.
In August of 2023 we rolled out three pretty major changes:
These changes had a few knock-on effects:
We've heard from multiple curators that the quality of their submissions since these changes has gone way up - and the overall approval rate has moved from ~22% to ~25% 🙌
If you look at the chart below, you'll see historical approval rates over time. In general, things have steadily move up toward the right.
* The spike and immediate drop in July 2021 was when we spun influencers out into their own separate category.