How to Use SubmitHub for Playlist Pitching | TAP
SubmitHub for playlist pitching
By TAP Editorial Team
Quick answer
SubmitHub is a paid pitching platform: you spend credits to put your track in front of a playlist curator, and that curator has to give you an answer. It works when you have checked the playlist first, that it is still being updated, that the followers behave like people, and that the sound matches yours. It is money wasted when you have not, because a credit buys a listen and never a placement.
SubmitHub is a paid pitching platform, and knowing exactly what you are paying for is the difference between a useful channel and a slow leak. A credit buys you a curator's attention and an answer. It does not buy a placement, and it tells you nothing about whether anybody is listening to the playlist behind that curator. Most of the money artists lose here is lost before the submission, in the two minutes of checking they decided to skip.
What a credit actually buys
A premium credit buys a promise: the curator listens for a minimum length of time and gives you an answer inside the window, or the credit comes back to you. That promise is the product, and it is a fair one. Nothing in it obliges anybody to add your record to anything, and any service telling you otherwise is selling you something else. SubmitHub also gives you a small free allowance that builds back up over time, with no guarantee of feedback attached, which makes it fine for testing and slow for a release with a date on it. Credits are sold in packs and the price per credit falls as the pack gets bigger, so check the current rate on the site rather than a number you read in a blog post, because it has moved before. Each curator sets how many credits their own submission costs, commonly one or two and more if their playlist is large. A round of fifty curators is therefore fifty to a hundred credits, which is real money for most independent artists and should be treated like it.
Approval rate is not a quality score
Every curator profile shows the share of submissions they approve, and it is the most misread number on the platform. A curator approving four in five is rarely somebody with wonderful taste who happens to like everything. They are usually running a large list that takes almost anything, and an add there sits beside two hundred others that nobody plays. A curator approving one in five is harder to please, and their yes is worth more precisely because it is rare, both to the listeners who follow a tended list and to you when you mention it later. Read the approval rate as a description of how selective somebody is, then go and look at the playlist itself. The percentage tells you about the curator's habits. Only the playlist tells you whether their audience exists.
Check the playlist before you spend the credit
Open the playlist on Spotify and give it two minutes. Look at when the last track was added, because a list untouched since the spring is not going to add yours this month. Look at the last ten additions and ask whether your record would sound out of place beside them, which is a question you can answer honestly in about thirty seconds. Look at the follower count against how the list describes itself, since tens of thousands of followers with no coherent theme usually means the numbers were bought or the list is a graveyard. Then look for the curator somewhere else, on a site, a newsletter or a social account where they talk about what they have been adding. People who are proud of their playlist say so in public. Those two minutes are the whole difference between spending money and losing it.
The message field is the part most people skip
Every submission carries a short message and most artists leave it blank or paste the same paragraph fifty times. Curators read a great many of these, and the ones who reply properly can tell inside a line whether you have opened their playlist. Name a specific track they added recently and say why yours sits next to it. Describe the record plainly, the sound, the release date and anything real happening around it, a session, a show, a station that has already played you. Leave the superlatives out, because every curator has read that this one is going to blow up and it reads as noise. Three or four sentences is plenty. A good message will not rescue a submission to the wrong playlist and will not make an unfinished record finished, but between two records a curator likes, it decides which one gets added.
When to pitch
Two to four weeks before release is the window that works. Earlier than six weeks and a curator is being asked to judge something they cannot add for over a month, so it goes to the bottom of a pile and stays there. After release day the reason to add you has gone, because they are looking at this Friday's records rather than last Friday's. Two to four weeks gives a curator time to listen, reply and fit you into an update that lands while the record is still new. Send one batch of twenty to thirty, then wait a fortnight and read the replies before you send any more. If the record has a seasonal shape to it, and plenty do, count backwards from when people would want to hear it rather than forwards from the day you finished mixing.
Where the platform sits against writing to people yourself
A curator who has published an email address in their playlist description or on their own site is telling you how they want to be approached, and writing to that address costs you nothing at all. SubmitHub earns its keep on the curators who publish no contact anywhere, which is a large number of them, and on the guarantee that somebody will actually listen. Use it there and be glad of it. When a curator you paid to reach replies well, keep their contact and write to them directly next time, because the second conversation should not cost you anything. The shape that works for most independent artists is a short list of people you write to by hand, a longer list you reach through the platform, and a note of everybody who has ever said yes. Paying per pitch into a list you cannot see is how artists get to the end of a credit pack with four adds on playlists nobody opens.
Keep a record of what happened
Hardly anybody tracks their submissions, which is why hardly anybody gets better at this. Keep one sheet with a row per submission: the curator, the playlist follower count on the day you sent it, the tag you used, whether you wrote a real message, the date, the answer, and what you saw afterwards in Spotify for Artists. After a couple of releases the pattern is obvious. Some curators say yes and nothing moves, which means their followers are not listening and you should stop paying to reach them. Some small playlists produce saves out of all proportion to their size, and those are the people to write to by hand next time. The sheet exists so that your third release starts from evidence instead of repeating the same fifty guesses as your first.
Key takeaways
- A credit buys a listen and an answer, never a placement. Everything else about the platform follows from that one fact.
- Approval rate describes how selective a curator is, not how good their playlist is. A very high one is usually a warning.
- Two minutes on the playlist itself, the last additions and the date of the last update, decides whether the credit is worth spending.
- Two to four weeks before release is the window. Much earlier gets ignored and anything after release day is too late.
- Curators who publish an email want to be emailed. Save the credits for the ones who publish nothing.
Pro tips
1. Look at the last five tracks added before you send anything. If the newest is more than two months old the playlist is dormant, whatever the platform shows you.
2. Name a real track in the message. One recent addition and one sentence on why yours belongs beside it is the entire personalisation job.
3. Send one batch of twenty to thirty, then stop and wait a fortnight. A second round shaped by the replies is worth more than fifty submissions fired at once.
4. When somebody says yes, find their email and keep it. The next release should be a direct message, not another credit.
5. Write down every rejection with the reason given. Three curators saying the vocal sits too low is information. One saying it is not for them is not.
Frequently asked questions
What do SubmitHub credits actually cost?
Credits are sold in packs and the price per credit falls as the pack gets larger, so check the current rate on the site rather than a figure you read elsewhere, because it has changed before. What matters more is how they get spent. Each curator sets their own price, commonly one or two credits, so a round of fifty curators comes to fifty or a hundred. There is also a small free allowance that builds back up over time, with no promise of feedback attached to it.
Should I pay for premium submissions or use the free credits?
Pay for the curators you have already checked and want a real answer from, because premium is what buys the guarantee of a reply inside the window or your credit back. Use the free allowance for testing, for new prospects and for anything without a date on it. Spending a paid credit on a playlist you have never opened is the most reliable way to waste money on the platform.
How do I know whether a curator's followers are actually listening?
You cannot see it directly, so use what you can. A list that gains followers month to month and gets updated regularly is being promoted by somebody who cares about it. A large follower count that has not moved in a year is not. After a placement, open Spotify for Artists: if the add produced no listeners at all, that curator's audience is not there, and you should not pay to reach them again.
What approval rate should I expect?
If you have chosen carefully, somewhere between a third and half of your target curators saying yes is a healthy return. Well below that usually points at the genre match rather than the record. Bear in mind too that a low approval rate at a selective curator is the reason to pitch them, and being turned down by somebody with taste tells you more than being accepted by somebody who accepts everyone.
Is SubmitHub worth it compared with paying somebody to promote the record?
It is honest about what it sells, which puts it well ahead of most playlist promotion. You are buying listens from named curators whose approval rate and history are on the page in front of you, rather than a promised number of streams from a source nobody will name. Even so, it is a top-up and not a campaign. The coverage that compounds comes from people who know who you are, and the platform is one way to meet some of them rather than a substitute for knowing anybody.
From the field
Proof points
- Named contact reply rate vs studio@: 5x higher (Liberty Music PR campaign data, 2024-2026)
- Best UK send window: Tue/Wed 09:00-10:00 UK (Across 60+ campaigns)
- Specialist shows beat playlist pitches: Named producers respond, playlist-only emails get dropped (Liberty 2024-2026)
- Genre-fit miss rate: ~30% of pitches hit outlets misaligned with the actual sound (Self-audit of 2024 sends)
What actually happened
Eyes Glued, BBC Radio 6 Music: 153 plays across 6 weeks, accelerating in week 4. Track-led pitch with a single playable line. (March 2025)
Submithub is useful as a top-up channel for blog and playlist coverage at small budget. The reply rates are honest and the feedback is fast. I treat it as a backstop, not a primary channel. Named-contact direct outreach still outperforms Submithub per pound on coverage that compounds. I run both in parallel for smaller releases and rely on direct outreach for the campaigns that need depth.
Chris Schofield, Radio plugger, Liberty Music PR
Related resources
Further reading
- TAP Blog — In-depth guides, comparisons and advice for independent artists running their own promotion.
- UK Music — The voice of the UK music industry, representing labels, publishers, and collecting societies.
- Music Week — Industry news, charts, and analysis for music professionals.
- The Music Network — Global music business intelligence and networking.
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