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If you’ve laid down your first tracks, you’ll be keen to get them to an audience and one of the best ways to do that is to submit your music to places that the audience uses to find new music.
The good news is that if you follow some fairly basic guidelines, there’s a good chance that your music can reach the masses relatively easily.
So, here’s a simple guide to submitting your music to every kind of media under the sun.
These guidelines apply to whatever and wherever you submit your music to. If you want to succeed, you have to adhere to the basics of music submission.
Finally, make sure your music is ready to be heard. Sure, you’ve got the laptop, you’ve got the home digital audio workstation and the studio headphones but if they only arrived yesterday?
You might want to wait a bit until your sound is a little more polished. Or not. It’s up to you.
There are two ways to get featured on blogs:
However, neither way guarantees that you’ll get selected for that blog’s playlist. This is a numbers game. The more pitches you send, the more likely you are to catch someone’s attention.
Assuming you have a Spotify for Artists account, then you can submit your tracks for inclusion in playlists there.
Apple doesn’t work in the same way, you need to build up your follower count and hope that the playlisting gods notice your work. Yeah, it sucks and it means Apple should not be your top marketing priority.
You can also use Groover and SubmitHub to try and get your song on user curated playlists.
There’s no clever software to make YouTube promotion easy and that’s probably for the best as it means the more work you do, the more likely you are to have some success.
Find the channel owner’s contact info on their YouTube page and reach out to them with a polite email or Tweet or whatever.
Do make sure that they cover your kind of music or you’ll just be wasting everyone’s time including your own.
You need the Twitch Soundtrack Tool if you want streamers to use your work. First, you upload the work to Twitch Soundtrack via their preferred distributors and second, you list it.
We should point out – that uploading and listing offers no guarantees at all that your music will make the cut. Amazon’s employees curate the soundtrack list – they decide if it’s going to feature or not.
The license terms means that your songs uploaded this way can only be used in Live Streams and not in pre-recorded content. However, users can use Linkfire to add songs from Live Streams to their personal library.
Influencers work very much like bloggers, you can use an automated tool like SubmitHub to get their attention or you can contact them directly.
Many platforms will have a list of contacts that they can provide for a fee. We’d suggest you curate your own list, as the paid-for lists are often weak and out of date.
Always follow an influencer’s submission guidelines if they have them, or you won’t hear back from them.
If you can find a DJ’s contact info on their website? There’s a good chance they take submissions.
Just make sure to:
DJs may also be receptive to being approach in person at a gig, as long as you do it at a convenient time and not in the middle of their set.
Get on the website of the radio station. Read the submission guidelines. Make sure your submission is in compliance.
Alternatively, if you have a little budget, engage a PR person to do this for you.
Labels also have submission guidelines on their websites. Follow them and please, make sure you’re submitting your music to the right kind of label.
No reggae label is going to suddenly publish black metal and no jazz label will take EDM. Don’t waste your time or theirs.
Most of all, make sure your pitch focuses on how your music helps their commercial objectives. Labels exist to make money, not to give newbies a chance.
You register your music with a music sync library and if somebody uses it, you’ll get paid a fee for it.
Now, you can arrange a license directly with a show or movie’s company but the truth is? Until you’re a known quantity, nobody will do this with you – so get on Songtradr.Com and get your songs in a library.
The video game industry works in the same way as film and TV.
However, because of the very long development cycles for games, they may require additional support over a longer time period than TV shows and movies, make sure you get paid for this.
It can be a bit nerve-wracking when you first start submitting your music but keep in mind, rejection is always a part of this process and that if you’re polite and persevere?
We guarantee that you’ll find an audience by simply following these basic submission guidelines.