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The "Really Good Bloggers" Program

2025 Update: Yes, Music blogs are still worth it!

This week we’re rolling out the “Really Good Bloggers” program to encourage blogs to blog more often and write more original content. These bloggers will receive extra compensation for their coverage, a cost that we’re offsetting by slightly adjusting SubmitHub’s prices for the first time in two years.

The Problem

The blogging landscape has changed a lot in the last 10 years. Back in the “good old days” bloggers would provide lengthy write-ups about the songs and albums they reviewed (often accompanied by an illegally hosted MP3 or two). Blogs had influence and clout; they became a daily part of any music aficionado’s online reading behavior.

Flash forward to 2017 and the array of tools for sharing emerging talent has become somewhat overwhelming: Spotify playlists, SoundCloud reposts, YouTube uploads, Tweets, Facebook shares, yada yada yada. Oh, and occasionally blog posts — but even then, more and more bloggers are simply slapping up songs with one or two sentence reviews, leaving both their readers and the artists they cover feeling just a bit deflated.

Perhaps it’s helpful to convey this using numbers:

  • In September, the outlets listed as “Blogs” on SubmitHub (excluding channels, labels, etc.) approved 7,854 songs
  • Of those, 5,424 included some sort of blog coverage = 69%
  • It’s worth noting that the majority of those blog posts include less than 5 sentences of original written content; some folks just copy-paste press releases or write one sentence
  • That means that 31% of the blogs decided to share songs somewhere other than their blog

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Consumers get their music all sorts of ways these days, and it’s important for bloggers to try and grow their presence on as many platforms as they can. Still, the “old-school” blogger in me feels like blogging serves a purpose as one of the purest forms of music coverage, and I’m hoping we can breathe some energy into that.

The Solution

This week we’re beginning the roll-out of the “Really Good Bloggers” program. The name is pretty self-evident, but for a blog to qualify, three boxes need to be checked:

  • At least 85% of their approvals on SubmitHub should include blog coverage
  • Their blog posts include original content alongside each song (ie, no copy-pasting press releases or cramming a bunch of embeds into the page)
  • Their turnaround time from “approval” to “marking as shared” should generally be less than two weeks

Besides getting a shiny badge and being part of a rad club, these bloggers will also receive extra compensation every time they approve a song as a blog post in recognition of their extra effort.

We’re hoping this program accomplishes a few things:

  • More blog posts
  • Better blog posts
  • A renewed sense of relevancy for blogging