Recent updates

[Changelog] May 30, 2025

There's been a lot of great stuff going on behind the scenes, particularly around SubmitHub Ads.

Oh, and I also launched a complete rebuild of my music blog Indie Shuffle!

SubmitHub Ads

Okay, this is where 90% of my time has been spent.

Since the start of the year we've launched more than 2,400 ads. All credit to our in-house pro Tilly who sets up each one manually: verifying the interests, looking at the targeting, styling the creatives, and more. It's a lot of work!

To keep this manageable, I've been focused on optimizing the process for all parties involved. Here's a rundown:

Ads Studio

You can now create your own ad creatives using the same tools we do.

  • Simply choose your background video, audio, and text
  • The end result looks like this (that's Tilly's latest song)
  • I spent a *lot* of time getting this video creation script to run smoothly. It's hosted on AWS Lambda and uses ffmpeg to combine the video, audio, background image, and text. Smooth as butter! 🧈

Misc

  • Tons and tons of stuff on the backend for myself and Tilly
  • Probably the coolest one there is an algorithm that automatically suggests the top background videos based on details provided when the ad was created (genres, similar artists, and theme)
  • To do this, I used ChatGPT's API to extract all sorts of "searchable" metadata from 10,000 video thumbnails. Maybe I'll do a video about it some time 📺
  • Cleaned up the "ADS" tab of Links for easier navigation
  • TBD: Still need to get the ADS → Results tab to be in the Analytics section. Splitting those two up doesn't make sense anymore
  • Updated + simplified the ad creation flow
  • A nifty new chart that tracks your performance
  • And a nice breakdown of your geographic performance directly from Meta

Oh, while I've got you, Jon from Two Story Media did a great rundown of the Ads platform. Peep it below:

Submissions

Standard submissions:

For years now, the elephant in the room has been that standard submissions aren't very effective 🐘

There are a few key issues:

  • The quality of standard submissions tends to be lower
  • Non-professionals and beginners often favor free submissions
  • Fewer curator options mean artists explore outside their genres, leading to poor targeting
  • Because of this lower targeting and quality, many curators keep standard submissions disabled
  • For those who keep them on, the volume of requests can be overwhelming.
  • To help, curators can set a limit on unanswered free submissions, but this means artists often see 50%+ of curators marked as having "reached their daily limit"

So, what's the solution? On the premium side: better targeting = more shares = happier curators and artists. A massive improvement came when we increased the premium pricing, as artists spent more time considering their selections.

The goal now is to guide standard submissions in a similar direction with two key changes:

  • Pricing is now linked to a curator's premium cost:
  • 1 standard credit if they usually cost 1–2 premium credits
  • 2 standard credits if they cost 3+ premium credits
  • Genre targeting is restricted to the "parent" genres of a song
  • Based on our in-house genre detector
  • This is a broad very categorization, but it prevents someone from submitting a rap song to ambient downtempo curators by mistake

I don't expect either change to fix things overnight. But as someone who personally fields 20–30 free submissions a day, I'll be keeping a close eye on what comes through.

I know this is going to be a controversial one, and many will have strong opinions. Feel free to use the comments suggestion below to provide constructive ideas :)

Other submission-related updates:

  • Fixed the "listen" button that lets you preview a curator's recent shares within your genres
  • The popup that appears if you've used too many standard credits now lets you remove existing selections
  • The "Promoted with SubmitHub Links" now just goes to Links rather than a convoluted flow of finding that curator's ads
  • If someone selects "choose for me" there's a similar logic around parent genres applied (similar to the logic we use for standards)

Misc

  • Curators are now notified when someone leaves a review
  • Improvements to Apple, Deezer and Amazon link handling (they keep changing their URLs!)
  • Database optimizations (notably for Copyright Dashboard and Hot or Not)

Oh, and I'm on the verge of rolling out an update to the AI genre detector. Getting that Suno 4.5 data in there...

Questions? Comments? Don't be shy!