[00:00:00] James: Welcome to episode 207 of the Bandhive Podcast it is time for another episode of the Bandhive Podcast My name is James Cross and I help independent artists tour smart and you know what you need to do to tour smart You need to have people listening to your music. What better way to get your music out there than marketing

[00:00:19] James: This week.

[00:00:19] James: I'm very pleased to welcome back to the show Mr. Jason Grishkoff, the founder of SubmitHub. How are you doing today, Jason?

[00:00:26] Jason: Great. Thank you, James Cross, for inviting me to your podcast for the second time.

[00:00:31] James: Oh, it's my pleasure.

[00:00:32] Jason: And before we jump in, I just want to say, for anyone who didn't listen to the original episode with Jason, or it's been two and a half years since you listened to it, That was number 66, SubmitHub, The Founder's Perspective, with Jason Grishkoff. You can find that at bandhive.

[00:00:47] James: rocks slash 66. And we have a couple other SubmitHub episodes as well. Number 63, SubmitHub Success Strategies, Steve Martin of Ascending Everest, and number 140, Why You Aren't Getting Approved [00:01:00] on SubmitHub. And you can find those at bandhive dot rocks slash 63 and bandhive dot rocks slash 140. And just for the record, why you aren't getting approved is Actually, things you should do so you do get approved.

[00:01:11] James: That's not a SubmitHub problem. That's a when you submit, you did something wrong problem. So, this week, Jason, we're going to talk about a lot of the new things that SubmitHub has come out with in the last few years because there have been some massive changes. But before we get into that, for the folks who didn't listen to those previous episodes, can you give us a little bit of background on who you are and what SubmitHub is and why people should use SubmitHub.

[00:01:35] Jason: I'll give you the 60 second or maybe 120 second rundown here. And I do think this context is important because many people think that SubmitHub was created for totally different reasons. So, I myself… I started a music blog in 2007 called Indie Shuffle and it was sort of the right time, right place to be starting a music blog.

[00:01:54] Jason: I was getting everything through torrents and sharing it with the world and an mp3 blog was a super [00:02:00] cool thing to have. And so it took off pretty quickly and within a year I found myself pretty absorbed in the… Idea of growing this website and sharing content and getting that interaction from people.

[00:02:13] Jason: And as I said, right time, right place. Music blogs were taking off in large part thanks to a website called Hype Machine, which did a really good job aggregating and summarizing what all of the music blogs on the internet were writing about. What that meant for us bloggers is that we became quite popular, which was cool.

[00:02:28] Jason: I don't think any of us really appreciated how influential we were at the time. But we definitely enjoyed going to music festivals and parties for free. What we weren't expecting was that a lot of people started to contact us. And eventually the cat got out of the bag. That if you were an emerging artist looking to do some marketing and get your song out there, the best way was to pitch music blogs your music.

[00:02:55] Jason: What that meant as a music blogger is that every morning I would wake up to 300 emails. From [00:03:00] individuals who didn't even read my blog. I'd get sent death metal songs, rap songs, and our blog was called Indie Shuffle. We were covering chill wave, blog wave, indie rock, a little bit of electronic stuff. But it was super untargeted and as a blogger that became quite frustrating.

[00:03:17] Jason: To have to sift through this enormous pile of submissions every day. And it really sucked all of the joy out of it. So what happened was that most of us bloggers actually just stopped looking at our submissions. And we would go out there and look for music ourselves. So I had my 20 favorite music blogs that I read.

[00:03:31] Jason: I'd wake up in the morning, look for content there, and then publish it on my blog. over time, what happened was independent artists weren't able to contact us because we were overwhelmed by emails. And we all started sort of regurgitating the same content as well. Like, ooh, a new Kid Cudi song, or a new Lana Del Rey.

[00:03:47] Jason: And you'd get 500 blogs jump on those songs, and the independent artists weren't getting noticed. So… In roughly 2014, it was quite a phase of transformation on the internet in terms of how [00:04:00] music blogs were being monetized and Facebook really cutting back on how much exposure they were giving to blogs.

[00:04:06] Jason: And I had to reassess things. I had quit my job. I was working for Google at the time. I had quit to take… Indie shuffle full time. And suddenly the rug was pulled out from most of us music blogs. And now we weren't earning enough money to do it full time, but we were still dealing with these 300 emails a day.

[00:04:22] Jason: And so I thought maybe there was a better way to go about it. And I decided that my next startup or my pivot or my idea, the thing that I would try to do so that all my eggs weren't in the indie shuffle basket was to create a. form that allowed really easy submissions. And so I took the coding knowledge I picked up with IndieShuffle and I slapped together a pretty simple website that just had artist name, song title, and a link to your song.

[00:04:46] Jason: And as a curator, I then got this list of songs that came through in a SoundCloud looking feed. Really easy to go through. I didn't have to open emails, download attachments, sign up for Dropbox, whatever. I didn't have to do any of that. I had this [00:05:00] beautiful feed and next to every song was a thumb up button or a thumb down.

[00:05:03] Jason: And if I said thumb up, it meant great, Jason from Indie Shuffle likes your song, he's going to blog it. And if I thumbed it down, it kind of meant I wasn't so into it. And within two or three months, we had about 20 or 30 other music blogs signed up using it. By the end of three months, there had already been something like 000 submissions. it was taking off really quickly. It was solving a problem that existed in the industry. It was allowing independent artists to actually reach curators and get a response. And then one of the things that naturally happened is that when, you know, an artist got these thumbs downs, they started to reach out and ask about, Why?

[00:05:36] Jason: Why did you thumb down my musical? Why won't you share it? And I thought, well, if you give me a dollar, I'll tell you. a lot of them said yes. So. SubmitHub today still has core background. That is the core of the product of what SubmitHub is. And I think I prefaced this by saying that there are many people out there who think that SubmitHub was created for different reasons.

[00:05:56] Jason: the important thing here is that SubmitUp was created to solve the problem that curators were [00:06:00] having with submissions. And what it meant was that independent artists actually had their submissions listened to.

[00:06:05] Jason: And I think now, 10 years later, a lot of people forget what it used to be like and how difficult it was to actually contact curators. You'd send out 5, 000 emails and hear back from 3 of them. And those days are gone. The downside is, of course, now you actually get to hear from everyone, and not everyone likes your music.

[00:06:20] Jason: Anyway, that's the long and short of SubmitHub, or why it exists.

[00:06:23] James: Yeah. So I just want to point out that, you are very publicly stating that no one at is a music hater. You're all there because you love music. That's where it comes from. That's where it started. And that's something that a lot of people who use the platform seem to miss.

[00:06:36] Jason: Yeah, there are… 2, 000 curators and influencers on SubmitHub. Not everyone is there with the same good intentions. The original group on SubmitHub were there as… music bloggers who love music. They weren't there to make money. Today, I cannot deny that there are definitely playlisters out there who have explicitly created their playlists so that they can sign up for SubmitHub[00:07:00] and make money through it.

[00:07:01] Jason: That's definitely a reality of the situation. It doesn't mean that they're doing it wrong. we look at those really closely. I mean, we can spot someone who has clearly just started a playlist. To make money. And so from our side, when we're going through applications for curators who want to join SubmitHub, about 80 to 85 percent of them get rejected.

[00:07:20] Jason: And one of the common reasons is that they've just begun. So we're looking for a good six months plus of history, working with music or working in the industry, or you've got a record label on the side, that type of stuff. We don't want to be working with curators who have done it explicitly to make money.

[00:07:37] Jason: And so I can't say with 2000 curators that there are no greedy playlisters on there. It certainly exists, those cases where that happens it's not the majority. It's something that we filter for quite a lot. And as long as they're actually generating substantive plays and delivering something of a high standard for artists, then we can make exceptions for it.

[00:07:57] Jason: I mean, it's not all. Rainbows and [00:08:00] butterflies we would like to be altruistic about it, but we realize the world's big and a lot of people have different motivations. So we're trying to build a platform that facilitates a lot of that. there have been more than a million unique people who've used SubmitHub.

[00:08:12] Jason: I think we're approaching one million unique registered accounts. So yeah, you're going to get people on all sides of the fence, all walks of life, different spectrums. it's really taken off and become something a lot larger than I could ever have envisioned.

[00:08:26] James: Yeah, so I joined uh, as a blogger in, it was either October or November 2016. It was right around when SubmitHub turned one, and seeing everything grow, and by the time this episode comes out, seven years, which is scary.

[00:08:41] Jason: yeah, it's going to be eight years for me. It's a long time. I've got some grey whiskers now.

[00:08:44] Jason: I didn't have

[00:08:45] James: got a beard. I don't think I had a beard when I started SubmitHub. I don't think you had a beard on the last interview either.

[00:08:51] Jason: the beard came with the pandemic.

[00:08:52] James: Okay, then you did have it. But, what I do remember is that all of the updates you've put out Fueled by what users [00:09:00] ask for and maybe it's not exactly what they ask for, but they have a need And you figure out a way to solve that need, even if it's not what they asked for.

[00:09:08] James: And there's a couple big updates that have been made recently. The first one I want to discuss is the marketplace. People can go there, and it's, basically like Fiverr, but better, is the way I look at it. Because it's people who are actually in these areas, they're in the community. So graphic design, audio, publicity.

[00:09:26] James: All that kind of stuff. Can you tell us about the Marketplace, who should use it, what the best areas you've found so far, the most popular areas are?

[00:09:35] Jason: Yeah, so the SubmitHub marketplace came about, as you mentioned, through a lot of feedback it was an attempt to try and solve a couple different problems that had come up or different requests. The biggest one was album and EP reviews. So since I launched SubmitHub, people have been asking for those.

[00:09:51] Jason: Back then, albums and EPs were a little more popular. They still exist today. They're not as standard. But there are people who want album and [00:10:00] EP reviews. So I've been threatening since 2015 to actually roll something out that would facilitate that. And I flip flopped on how I would do it. And the marketplace helped solve that.

[00:10:09] Jason: At the same time, we had a lot of producers, mixers, masters, audio technicians, whatever, on the platform who were trying to make connections and help people and pitch their services and do that type of stuff. And often times we would have to intervene and say look, you know, SubmitHub's not really the place for you to be pitching these types of services.

[00:10:27] Jason: And they would say, well, you know, why not? SubmitHub is, it's where musicians meet people in the music industry. and can't you build something that will help facilitate that? And I thought, oh, okay, alright, cool. Well, good place. And then from there we just kind of went and said, well, you know, look, that's true.

[00:10:43] Jason: SubmitHub is. A community of people working in the music industry. And so I wanted to think about the life cycle of a release and all the different things that have to go into that as an artist from creating your music, mixing it, mastering, getting the artwork, Spotify and eventually the marketing, right?

[00:10:59] Jason: [00:11:00] this event up marketplace was born in June of this year, August, September, October, where about four months into it now. And it's a pretty simple community that allows you to reach out to people for help. They'll come back to you with a quote for the work and then you can either approve it or decline.

[00:11:16] Jason: The biggest section of it by far has been the album and EP reviews. So I think in those four months we've done more than 5, 000 album and EP reviews through this platform. So, a way, you're buying an advertorial on these blogs. There's a very similar platform called Muzo Soup that effectively offers the same thing.

[00:11:34] Jason: So what happens on Muzo Soup is you send your song in and then a bunch of people make offers on it. So the blogs will come to you and say, Hey, I love your song. If you pay me 20, I'll cover it. On this version of that, you actually reach out to the curators, ask them if they want to cover your song, and then they come back with a quote.

[00:11:49] Jason: What makes it a little bit different is that on Muzo Soup, there's no disclosure about that relationship or that exchange. And therefore it's technically defined as payola, whereas on [00:12:00] SubmitHub we actually do ask the curators to disclose at the footer of each content or article that they write that it was published with support from SubmitHub.

[00:12:07] Jason: Uh,so yeah, the, album and EP side of it has taken off substantially. The graphic arts audio engineering and PR side of things. It's a lot slower. We haven't really done any marketing or pushed it at all. But I think one thing that's pretty cool about the Marketplace is that since rolling it out four months ago, I've done barely any code on it and it just works. to be completely frank with you, I haven't put much time or thought or effort into it. It was an immense amount of work to get it up and running. It was… Three or four months of dedicated coding where that was pretty much the only major task I was focused on. And then I had this huge site release and you know, I went on holiday.

[00:12:44] Jason: And I came back and then I just let it be there. I haven't done anything since. know one of the next steps we need to do, I think, is generate a bit more awareness about it. So thanks for bringing it up. I think it's one of those things that we're sort of just letting simmer in the background for now.

[00:12:56] Jason: And we've got bigger fish to fry. We've got other things to touch on, but the meat and [00:13:00] potatoes of SubmitHub is the submission to curators. And so the better we can make that, the more worthwhile people will find SubmitHub, and the less of that wonderful online banter I will encounter about how terrible the platform is.

[00:13:13] James: Yeah, absolutely. And I have uh, a list of changes that were made to the submissions that we're going to talk about in a second. Uh, One thought, though, struck me about the Marketplace. You said that things are a lot slower on the graphic design, the audio, that kind of side. And I realized, yeah, you know, you only need maybe.

[00:13:28] James: One or two engineers, you know somebody record and somebody else to mix and master So you could have a project with one person But then when you submit it for album reviews, you might send that to 10, 20, 30 people

[00:13:39] Jason: people are often doing that, volume there definitely makes sense. they're what, 120, 000 songs released a day. It's a lot of album artwork.

[00:13:46] James: some insane number

[00:13:47] Jason: I'm skeptical about that number. I mean, they say it, but how much of that is back catalog? How much of it is AI? I don't know.

[00:13:55] James: I've heard horror stories of people who, they put their music out and then [00:14:00] somebody else just re uploads it under their own name, and it's like, that's mine, like,it seems like a lot of people have that happen, unfortunately.

[00:14:05] Jason: on SubmitHub, we're doing about 1000 unique songs per day. Uploaded.

[00:14:09] James: if you think about that. Let's say 120, 000 is the true number. That's almost 1 percent of all daily music. That's honestly amazing. that's a huge chunk right there.

[00:14:20] Jason: Yeah, it's pretty chunky which explains why I submit how we can be competitive it's not easy for everyone. think almost everyone considers their song to be top 5 percent But only the top 5 percent can be the top 5 percent

[00:14:32] James: yes, exactly. And, and what this is actually reminding me is I have to put my own band song on SubmitHub later this afternoon. So uh, I will be in there swimming with the little fishes as well. It's not just me. Granted, this episode comes out on uh, November 14th, so it'll… be long in the past. Maybe I'll do a quick outro, like punch in, telling you how my campaign did. speaking of campaigns, like I said, things changed quite a bit on the submission side. I want to say it was also around July of this year.[00:15:00] For anyone who hasn't used SubmitHub in the past, it used to be that if you paid for submissions, you could do either free, which means no guarantees, you just Get a yes or a no, or you can pay anywhere from one to three credits, which are roughly equivalent to a dollar.

[00:15:15] James: And paying that would get you 20 seconds listen time at minimum and 10 words of feedback or more. And now it is 60 seconds of listen time and 20 words of feedback. you know, I could talk about this for days because I've been on the platform so long, but you're the expert here, Jason. Why did we make that change on SubmitHub?

[00:15:33] Jason: It was another example of trying to solve a couple different problems With one update, SubmitHub hasn't really changed its prices since 2015, and the cost per credit has been going down, down, down, down, down. There are people getting credits for as cheap as 60 cents a credit. So you have that side, and then you had curators asking for more money.

[00:15:56] Jason: Naturally, of course they're going to. And I've been reluctant to do [00:16:00] that because for me, SubmitHub comes from a different place. It's about discovering and finding new music that you love. And it's not about trying to make a bunch of money. so I had been reluctant to increasing the price. But I was aware that many of the competitors Groover, Playlist Push are paying significantly more to their curators.

[00:16:17] Jason: So Groover is now charging Two, four, or six euros per submission and playlist push has consistently been around 10 to 15 per submission. So we had a growing number of influential Spotify playlisters who were sort of threatening to leave the platform because they felt like weren't being valued.

[00:16:36] Jason: And so it was this struggle that I was having internally where I didn't want to raise prices or add a new tier, but at the same time I want to deliver high quality playlists to people, good curation, and I don't want to lose these people. On top of that, I'm aware that since 2015 you know, inflation's been crazy lately, but that's still, that's eight years of small inflation plus bigger inflation, and the prices really haven't changed since then.

[00:16:59] Jason: So, [00:17:00] I decided that we were going to add a new four credit tier. But I didn't just want to launch into that. I actually wanted to make sure that we gave artists something as well. And so the common complaints from artists are that 10 words of feedback is kind of lacking in content or substance. And that 20 seconds of listen time is not enough for you to properly consider a song.

[00:17:19] Jason: So as a bit of a compromise there, what I decided to do was add this four credit tier, but also increase the requirements of curators. So I'm basically saying to curators, cool. You can have the bigger price, but you got to do more work now. And so, attempting to balance those two things, it's this constant tug of war, right?

[00:17:35] Jason: Where, in a curator's perfect world, they would just get paid tons of money for being on there and doing what they do. And in an artist's perfect world, they would love to get 100 percent share rate for free. so there's this balance of these two extremes that can never really be fully accomplished.

[00:17:50] Jason: I'm trying to find the midpoint there. So… This big change that I rolled out was, yeah, to increase the listen time from 20 seconds to 60 seconds, to increase the words of feedback from 10 to 20, [00:18:00] and also, then give two things back to the curators. So I gave them that four credit tier, which roughly 10 percent of curators are eligible for, and we also increased the amount of time that curators are given to respond to their submissions.

[00:18:13] Jason: So it went from 48 hours to 72 hours. Which, you know, 24 hours is not a lot of time, but that's 50 percent more time. So it actually makes a pretty significant difference in terms of the stress that curators feel having to log in and respond to stuff. And, I wasn't sure what the impact of that would be, but, What happened almost overnight was that the volume of submissions dropped 10%. People didn't want to spend as much money. They saw these prices go up, and they were, whoa, whoa, okay, hold on, hold on. Four credits, is this really worth it? So they started to think a lot more about who they were going to send to and how they were gonna spend their budget. So overall submission volume dropped 10%, but curators were able, for the most part to keep their earnings kind of level, get fewer songs, but have them more targeted.

[00:18:56] Jason: And what happens site-wide is that the average [00:19:00] approval rate went from 22% to, today it's 26%, so it went up 4%, it's like an 18 percent increase the overall average approval rate. And that was something I didn't anticipate, but it makes sense in hindsight.

[00:19:12] Jason: You know, if people are a little bit more selective with their budget because it doesn't go as far, they're going to make better selections about who they send to curators are going to get higher quality, better targeted content, and they're going to want to share it more. So that's really what's happened as a result of that change.

[00:19:25] Jason: if you search Playlist Push versus SubmitHub, the top article comes up talking about SubmitHub's 6 percent approval rate versus Playlist Push's 15%. And I'm like, yeah, okay, buddy. It's a little bit outdated. it was for many years. SubmitHub's hovered around that 9, 10, But today we're at 26%. this is one of those changes that helped with that. Better genre targeting has definitely been another factor that has helped quite a lot there.

[00:19:49] James: sounds like a massive increase. And I seem to recall that approval rate, the 6%, was, for standard submissions, wasn't it?

[00:19:56] Jason: so for many years standards were hovering at around 2 or 3 percent and premium was [00:20:00] 9%.

[00:20:00] James: I think standards are still around 4 or 5%. It's quite difficult to get an approval with a free submission. Whereas the premium ones are at 26 percent now. so yeah, it's a big jump.

[00:20:10] James: 100 percent worth it, too. I mean, if you think about it Let's call it 4, That's worth it. You're getting a good share. And if it's a four credit curator, you're on one of the best curators, too.

[00:20:20] Jason: You know, it's not going to be some tiny list. so this is a tricky one, because a lot of people try to convert the 4 directly into listeners. So, to get 4 on Spotify, optimistically, you need 1, 000 streams. If you get shared by a four credit playlister on SubmitHub, you're probably going to give out 200 or 300.

[00:20:35] Jason: There's a few that'll get you 1, 000 but most of them are going to get you 200 or 300. So you're not actually going to make your money back directly from that, but then that gets into the broader question of why you even do independent playlisting to begin with. And what we found there is that it's a way to trigger Spotify's algorithm and sort of coach it along the way so that you can get into Discover Weekly and Fresh Finds and become recommended act for fans who also like.

[00:20:59] Jason: so [00:21:00] really, the real value of the playlisting side of things is to try and teach Spotify's algorithm about where your music belongs so that Spotify can make better algorithmic decisions when it comes to sharing it. So it's, it's a long play, right? go on Reddit, have a feel there, because there's a lot of negative stuff on Reddit about SubmitHub.

[00:21:16] Jason: They all know me by namelike there was one two days ago in the top uploaded comment, I think has 60 upvotes, and it was like, just wait for Jason to get here and try to defend it. I'm not even going to respond to that comment, but I'll respond to all the others. Anyway, I think part of that misconception is that that 4 that you're getting for that share is probably not going to convert directly to it.

[00:21:35] Jason: Another one to think about is if you send to four curators who cost four credits each, you're going to spend 16 credits and you're likely to get one approval. So now you're actually looking at about 16 credits for that one approval. Again, trying to think about it in direct terms of what your ROI is from that share specifically is going to end up looking pretty bad.

[00:21:53] Jason: But playlisting is about that long tail and trying to get it. And as soon as you get removed from those playlists, you're gonna drop [00:22:00] off. But it's, trying to kickstart that algorithm, right? It's not easy to do, but I think that's really the value add. about a year and a half ago, I really sat down.

[00:22:07] Jason: I was like, okay, what is the point of all of this? Right? and the question was I've done the math and it just doesn't work out. It's like, okay, well, hold on. Why even do this? How can we help people with playlisting? and is there real value here? And I had this sort of existential moment and then it sort of clicked that the goal of is to teach Spotify where your music belongs.

[00:22:28] Jason: So. Many of my changes over the last year and a half have been trying to push people in that direction. So, I'm trying to push people towards playlists that are quite niche and focused on their music. I'm trying to push people towards playlists that are more likely to share their music with an audience that's going to enjoy their music.

[00:22:43] Jason: And the future updates I make, as well, will have this in mind. Really, I want to make sure that you don't end up in a playlist next to a bunch of songs that have nothing to do with your song. I want you to end up in a playlist. That has a bunch of songs by artists whose fan base are [00:23:00] also likely to enjoy your music.

[00:23:01] Jason: And it's really difficult for crossover artists to try solve this, right? and, you know, some of that is is it my fault or is it Spotify's fault or is it just listener behavior, right? There was a really detailed YouTube video about this recently that came out that kind of gets into the crux of this problem.

[00:23:17] Jason: Where Spotify is rewarding very specific niche listening behaviors, and they're pushing people into these silos. But some of that is just the way that people are looking for music. feeling chill, so I go on Spotify and I search for a chill playlist. Down tempo jazz, whatever, like these are the niches people are looking for.

[00:23:33] Jason: Those playlists that are all over the place are rare, and Spotify's got some of them. One of them's called Pollen or something, but got quite scattered things. But I had a good talk with Ari Herstand from Ari's Take, and he pointed out that one of his artists got added to one of these Spotify editorial playlists, and it completely screwed them over, because it confused Spotify's algorithm.

[00:23:55] Jason: They were getting played next to a bunch of artists that didn't actually sound like them. And suddenly their [00:24:00] fans also like section became this mishmash of artists that they didn't want to be associated with. Because what it meant was that when you got recommended in Release Radar or Discover Weekly, you had really bad retention rates on those songs.

[00:24:13] Jason: Because you were alongside stuff that people weren't really looking for. So is it a Spotify problem? Is it not? I don't know whose fault it is, but for me, what I've identified with independent playlisting and also Facebook advertising and all of that is that you really want to focus in on the niche of listeners that you have, because that's how you can teach Spotify's where you belong.

[00:24:30] Jason: all, I 100 percent agree with you and I've always looked at it less so from the The playlisting side just because I have never been into Spotify playlist I'm the kind of person who listens to an album in full and that's But I understand that it is a huge thing I've always personally looked at submit hub is hey you find that one person who becomes a fan of your music and they buy a shirt or They come to your show and buy a ticket whatever it is if they support you as a fan That also is a huge long term benefit.[00:25:00] [00:25:00] James: really, if you're spending 20 credits, you know, finding one fan out of that, that already make for those credits right there over time. You just have to, know, kind of sit there and wait. Okay, you know, hey, this person found us from that blog post or that Spotify playlist. Oh, that was three years ago, and they're still listening?

[00:25:15] James: That's sick. Now, the other thing that I wanted to, Touch on there is what you're saying uh, Ari's take. Because, getting on that wrong playlist, it really can mess you up. And it's a shame to hear that even Spotify is doing that on their official playlists. they should know

[00:25:30] Jason: but this is one of the risks there are other marketing services out there like YouGrow and a lot of these ones that say that they're sort of SEO powered. And I saw Andrew Southworth, who's a YouTube promoter and how to market your music type of guru. saw him do a review on one of these platforms and he got a bunch of shares out and a bunch of listeners.

[00:25:47] Jason: And then I started poking through the playlists that he got added to because for some reason in the video, he's super secret, he's like, I can't tell you which playlists there were the company doesn't want me to say it or something. So I just went and it was really obvious which ones they were. It [00:26:00] was like, 90s boy band hits.

[00:26:02] Jason: I was like, why is your synthwave song in a 90s boy band hits playlist? And so they're doing all of these for SEO, search engine optimization. So these companies are out there trying to look at the top terms on Spotify. What do people search for? And then they want to make sure they have a playlist that pops up for that.

[00:26:17] Jason: And those playlists are actually pretty bad. Another example, soundtrack playlists. like a guardians of the galaxy playlist, right? Which actually has no songs from guardians of the galaxy. It's just trying to rely on the fact that people are searching for it. Those playlists can hurt you.

[00:26:29] Jason: Soa lot of our emphasis has been pushing people towards. These playlists that are hyper focused on their music, which is good news for people who are hyper focused, and bad news for people who are crossover. That's not to say there's not a space for the crossover ones, but on the playlisting side specifically, it's a really difficult game to crack if you are multi genre.

[00:26:49] Jason: On the blog side, that's where you might want to pivot into it. then, this is a tangent, but alluded to it. If I was an artist today and I played music live, because not everyone plays live, [00:27:00] right? Study beats guys, maybe they just want to sit in their room. But if I played music live, the internet marketing would not be my technique for making fans.

[00:27:08] Jason: So I would use internet marketing to make it look like I didn't have a dead profile. I would try to get my Spotify listeners up to one or two thousand monthly listeners. I would try to get my Facebook… Having a few likes on every piece of content. I would try to make my Tik Tok or my Instagram look active, whichever platforms you choose to curate.

[00:27:27] Jason: You don't have to do all of them. You just need to have something out there when people look for you. Right? So if they go look up your band on Google, you want to have some blog posts there that you can share, especially if it's someone you're trying to book a show with, and then those live shows are really where you're going to create those fan.

[00:27:42] Jason: Connections and those relationships and so I would start out in my local community trying to get booked for these shows and I might use the internet to try and bolster my profile, make it look like I'm buzzing a bit, but then I would go and open up for some bands, try to draw some traction there and I keep going locally.

[00:27:57] Jason: I really think, on the internet, you are, [00:28:00] plankton in the ocean. But in your town, you're a small fish small fish eat plankton. So rather be the small fish

[00:28:08] James: Heh, heh, heh, heh,

[00:28:08] Jason: in your town and grow from there and then grow start in your town, move to your county. Next thing you're playing the state, that type of stuff.

[00:28:16] Jason: there's a much more direct path to success there. And for me, I think the internet marketing, including SubmitHub. Facebook ads, all of that, the odds of you breaking out from that or having any success from it are minuscule. So I think that they're far better used as sort of a supplemental thing to make you look professional, make it look like you have engagement and something going on.

[00:28:37] Jason: I don't think that generates real fans. Like what's the point of having a bunch of streamers in Australia if you live in California? Doesn't help, right? for me, online marketing, the digital promo, that type of stuff, the odds of you breaking out or having success from it are very minimal, especially if you play live.

[00:28:52] Jason: You've got a much better path to success, and I think that the internet stuff is just about crafting your brand, your resume, the way you look. [00:29:00] It's a bit of a different game if you make study beats, something where you'll never actually play live. Then you're looking at how you can trigger the algorithms and get into these playlists that just, people put on in the background on loop. Different ball space. That's where you get into the genre niche and targeting.

[00:29:14] James: Well, I think it's also really important there to highlight that you are explaining this difference, and it is so rare for me to see somebody who talks about music marketing to talk about the differences between different genres and different styles of music, whereas, you know, study beats, you're not playing live rock bands, you better be playing live.

[00:29:33] James: And I'll just see people pitch this one size fits all approach. It's like, yeah, that might work, but it probably won't. So, look out for that. Personally, I do have to say, I think that it is possible to make fans online if you make the right connection. But that takes a lot of personal intervention as well.

[00:29:49] James: You have to build a community around what you're doing online. And if you don't have the time or energy for that, then it just, it doesn't Like, it needs a lot community building in [00:30:00] that aspect

[00:30:00] Jason: Instagram great for that.

[00:30:02] James: yeah, absolutely, especially TikTok with the algorithm these days

[00:30:05] James: and I

[00:30:05] Jason: takes so much

[00:30:06] James: a handful I, I know a band that, and this was a long time ago, so it's not so relevant anymore, but, They built basically their entire career to the point that they got signed to a major record label Just because they were putting out covers monthly online and they were having monthly live streams with like 50 to 100 people Just having a chat and then they would play a song and that was it and they were doing that every month for like three Years and that worked but it was so much work that most people just can't replicate that that's what it comes down to in my opinion if you can't do that then a hundred percent just Go with what you're saying Jason and play live as much as you can without saturating the market

[00:30:40] Jason: you also got to be willing to put

[00:30:41] Jason: yourself out there, right?

[00:30:42] Jason: Yeah, but on that note like you said that is a tangent but a topic that I think we could discuss at length just because It's so important for artists to realize that as important as tools are, that includes SubmitHub, you can't have just one tool. You can't say, hey, SubmitHub is our marketing strategy.

[00:30:59] James: [00:31:00] it can be a part of the marketing strategy, and I think it should be. But it cannot be the entire marketing strategy. I think we talked about that the last time you were on the show on episode 66. So again, if people haven't heard that yet, head on over to bandhive. rocks slash 66. But there's some more changes that I want to discuss on SubmitHub so people get the full picture of how much you listen to what the users want and that you're really looking out for the users when it comes down to it.

[00:31:29] James: So for example… And this is one that I don't know a lot about. But record labels used to be on SubmitHub, and that is no longer a feature of the site. did notice that people would complain, like, what's this label actually So I have the feeling it was probably because it was, the small, independent labels, and they probably didn't do much. my gut tells me that might be why, but I'd love to hear it from you, and I think the audience would as well.

[00:31:50] Jason: There were a couple factors involved in the decision to shutter the label side of things. Number one, good labels are not on the internet looking for artists [00:32:00] to pitch their music. Most of the labels who are online trying to sign deals are predatory. They're just trying to sign as many songs as they can with a really favorable contract for them in the hopes that maybe one will break out.

[00:32:12] Jason: But they're just going to say yes to everything, take the rights, publish off of it and go. so what we found on SubmitHub is that we struggled to have a good offering of labels that were high quality because the high quality labels. Don't want submissions. They've got their own ways of finding acts through their local community.

[00:32:29] Jason: They probably don't want to sign an act in Sydney if they're based in San Francisco. Right? It doesn't make sense. They're going to be looking for local acts because a good label is basically your manager, your suite. They take care of everything for you so that you can make music. And they do the rest, right?

[00:32:45] Jason: They handle the business side of things, because they want to make money from it. you're not going to find labels on the internet who are accepting submissions from strangers for that type of stuff. That's not to say that labels don't use the internet to find things like this, but they're going to reach out[00:33:00] on their own when they find something that they like and that they're interested in because they bumped into it on YouTube or on their favorite blog or in a playlist that they love.

[00:33:07] Jason: That's how they're going to do their ANR. So what we had on SubmitHub was a bunch of predatory labels who were signing too many things, creating a whole bunch of admin headache. I feel like it made us look bad. And roughly that time Groover announced that they were going to start taking label submissions.

[00:33:21] Jason: And I thought, fantastic, let's make this their problem instead. And so now if you want a predatory label, To sign your music, you can go to Groover, where you will find hundreds, if not thousands, of predatory Italian labels who will sign your song Without even caring what it sounds like so that they can hope that they can get some revenue from it I mean that's really it We didn't want to get in the middle of all these fights that are going on, these contracts happening, these agreements, these types of things totally wasn't worth our time and at the end of the day, we don't want to expose artists to potential scams And it was proving really hard to do that on the label side.

[00:33:57] Jason: We were trying to vet these people, look into it. But until [00:34:00] they really started using SubmitHub, it was hard to know what they were, what their behavior was going to be like. We could look at their website, their roster, that type of stuff. But, yeah, it was difficult. So, it was such a small part of SubmitHub's overall revenue, less than 1 percent of submissions, that…

[00:34:16] Jason: We decided it wasn't worth the headache anymore. It was taking up 20 or 30 percent Jamie, who, heads up the sort of integrity of the curators, and she was also doing the labels as well, and it was too much. It was wasting her time. and yeah, we didn't feel like it was worth it. so it's gone.

[00:34:31] Jason: there'd probably been about five complaints about it missing, but at the end of the day… I feel like we've never been stronger as a platform in terms of quality the service that we offer. I mean, I don't want to name and shame Groover here, but I do think that's what sets us apart from them.

[00:34:44] Jason: And potentially other similar platforms is the amount of time we spend vetting our curators, not only when they apply to join, but while they're on the platform. The constant reviews that are going on, the feedback, looking at their followers, looking at their engagement. Like, it stresses curators out.

[00:34:58] Jason: aware of that.[00:35:00] So it's a delicate thing to balance. the last thing I want to do is expose artists to curators who are useless, scammy, or just have the wrong intentions. And so we put a lot of time into looking at our 2, 000 curators. It used to be 3, 000. We've actually chopped it down substantially.

[00:35:17] Jason: And we spend a lot of time making sure that they're good. Whereas I know… Name and shame time. I know there are definitely fake playlisters on Groover. I've called them out on Twitter, I've shown the evidence. know a number of people who have applied to join SubmitHub will often say, but why'd you reject me?

[00:35:31] Jason: I'm on Groover. And I will go, it's because you bored all your followers. The vetting level is very different there. And it's easier to do with curators than it is with record labels. So, bye bye record labels. Gone.

[00:35:41] James: makes total I have to say, I've heard people say, Oh, I get so many more approvals on Groove. I'm but do you? Do you really? Like, Quality over quantity, in my opinion, is what it comes down to. And that's what you're saying there as well. I also like that you're alluding to essentially the 80 20 principle.

[00:35:57] James: Where you're saying, like 30 percent of our [00:36:00] time was wasted on this when 1 percent of revenue was from this. So, let's toss that out the window. Why would we deal with that if it's such a time suck?

[00:36:07] Jason: when I was at Google, I remember Larry Page saying More wood behind fewer arrows. So the idea of being, you know, cull of the extra projects that are taking up too much time and keep focusing on the main ones. So for us, that's curative submissions that's really where we're the strongest.

[00:36:21] Jason: and we have the experience developing this whole industry really.

[00:36:25] James: Yeah. far as I know, SubmitHub was the first Like, I hadn't heard any of the other alternatives in 2016. there was SubmitHub and that was

[00:36:33] Jason: Yeah, there were one or two, playlist push came about in 2016 or 2017, but when I launched there was, some platform, I forget what it was, but basically you could hire an expert to critique your song. It had nothing to do with being shared.

[00:36:47] James: And that one was slowly generating some traction, but it was like 30 per critique.

[00:36:52] Jason: was no consideration, there was no sharing, that type of stuff.

[00:36:55] James: So, similar idea, different execution, Bye. As you're saying, this is your [00:37:00] strength, which, from an outsider's perspective, I agree. There are also other features that have been brewing with new updates. One of them being Hot or Not, where recently introduced the Verified Reviewers program.

[00:37:12] James: Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah,

[00:37:13] Jason: Hot or Not's an interesting one. At its peak, Hot or Not was doing about 10, 000 votes a day. the idea with Hot or Not for people who don't know is it's for artists to rate other artists. So if you leave feedback for an artist, you will get feedback on your song. So it's sort of like, I scratch your back, you'll scratch my back in return.

[00:37:30] Jason: and so. So, you can go on to Hot or Not, rate 10 songs, and get 7 ratings of your own song. You send them out there. If you don't have time, you can actually use a premium credit to buy some ratings. It's super cheap. I think it's 6 credits for 50 ratings. So, you can go on there, request these ratings, and then if you're an artist as well, not only do you get your own song rated, but if you rate enough songs, 20 of them, you'll get a free premium credit. It's way below minimum wage, but that's not the point. It's a nice little bonus to [00:38:00] incentivize you to write feedback. You are still getting the reviews of your own song. That's the main thing that's sort of backscratching. That's still going on. The idea with the verified reviewers was that there are some people who put a lot more effort into writing feedback for other artists.

[00:38:13] Jason: And we wanted to retain those people. We don't want them to grow tired or leave hot or not. And so what we did was we actually improved their reward. So instead of 20 feedbacks for a free credit, they only have to write 10 feedbacks for a free premium credit. And of course, they're still getting the ratings on their own song as well.

[00:38:31] Jason: So the credits are a bonus, but they get them twice as fast. So really, the idea with the verified thing was to reward people who do put the effort in, give them a little bit more back, try to retain them as well. mentioned at the start that at its peak it was at about 10, 000 votes a day, and I think today it's down to about 5, 000.

[00:38:48] Jason: The votes do come in fairly slowly. If you put your song in, 2 or 3 votes a day. So if you request 50 votes, it's gonna take almost 2 weeks for you to get 50 reviews. lot of this is because in the last 3 months I [00:39:00] have banned 200 accounts, roughly. For various attempts at taking advantage of Hot or Not.

[00:39:07] Jason: it's the internet. It's accessible to anyone. And when you put something free out there for people to use, they're going to try to take advantage of it. So, there's a lot of people who use VPNs to try and write feedback from different accounts. Some people have tried to chat GPT bots.

[00:39:19] Jason: Oh, there's the copy pasting stuff that people found, Loopholster. Anyway, I found all sorts of ways to catch these people. so yeah, about 200 accounts have been banned and so now the number of daily votes has dropped. I would love to get more engagement on there and have, more than 5, 000 votes a day and allow you to get those 50 requests finished off a lot quicker, but it's easier said than done.

[00:39:39] Jason: And again, this is one of those 80 20 principles where really with Hot or Not, making any money. We're actually… Giving all those credits back. So if someone comes along and spends six credits for 50 reviews, those are the same credits that go towards rewarding people for giving feedback. So it's sort of self completing system, if you will. not a major core of the product, but it's [00:40:00] a nice part of SubmitHub that sort of adds something. You know, you often see on Reddit people going, you know, I hate SubmitHub. It's a scam. All the curators are just trying to steal your money. But, Hot or Not's not that bad. So I'm like, all right, cool.

[00:40:10] Jason: got one sort of convinced. mean, that's sort of what's going on there. So I do fiddle around with it, tweak it and improve it here and there. I adjusted the algorithm slightly about two days ago in terms of which songs come up. trying to make sure that songs that haven't had a vote for a while get a vote quicker.

[00:40:24] Jason: at the end of the day it's not exactly where I want it to be in terms of engagement. It's not at the all time high, right? I mean, once something hits an all time high, you're never satisfied until it sort of goes above that, right? And so it's not there. So I'm not satisfied, but I don't have the answer for how to get back to that, previous state and then exceed it.

[00:40:44] Jason: so, SubmitHub, for example, about three or four days after they create their account, I send them an email introducing HotOrNot as a feature. Does it work? Eh, I mean, a bit laborious. It's a bit of a chore as an artist to sit there and rate 20 songs. As a curator, it's also quite laborious.

[00:40:59] Jason: You [00:41:00] get paid a little bit better than you would with Hot or Not. So until I actually am dishing out more money for Hot or Not, the odds of of usership is unlikely. And so I just need to be… Kind of careful with that balance. One thing I could do, I'm just thinking out loud here, is increase the prices.

[00:41:14] Jason: So, you know, six credits for 50 ratings is pretty darn cheap. Could make it 10 credits for 50 ratings. And then what I could do in exchange was actually give out more premium credits for less feedback. So if you are a verified reviewer, you know, you get it for every five. And if you're not, you get it for every 10.

[00:41:29] Jason: So these are the, sort of things I could fiddle with, trying to find that equilibrium where I'm not losing money on Hot or Not. I don't want it to be losing, you know, a couple hundred dollars a day that really adds up over time. And right now it's kind of like plus five, minus five, plus five, minus five.

[00:41:43] Jason: So, I'll fiddle with it a bit. I've cleared up most of my big projects. I don't have any mega major ideas. Lined up so I'm going to be working a lot over the next few months of just chipping away some of smaller wishlist y things that I have. And I tend to do this every year.[00:42:00] [00:42:00] James: And then in December I take almost a month of not working very hard. Do all my emails, customer support, but no coding. And then in January I come back and I'm like, new feature, new feature, new feature. you're resetting yourself for the next So I'm excited to see what January brings.

[00:42:15] Jason: well, as we wrap things up here, there's one area of the site that we haven't talked about yet, which is the influencer side of things.

[00:42:22] Jason: Hmm.

[00:42:22] James: uh,

[00:42:22] James: that has seen a lot of change. I think that probably has seen more change than any of the other areas, just because you're always testing new things So can you give us the rundown of the current state of the influencer side of the platform?

[00:42:35] Jason: Yeah, it's gone through a lot of iterations. It started out the same way that curator submissions do. So, influencers were paid for consideration. And if they shared a song, they didn't get paid anymore. And our pitch to them was If you get 20 songs and you accept one, then it's sort of like you got 10 to share that one.

[00:42:51] Jason: And that didn't really work. Influencers weren't so hot on that. They're not music curators. They're not there because they love music. They're there because they want to get paid. So they weren't happy to sit [00:43:00] through, listen to a bunch of songs That wasn't their thing. so then we shifted.

[00:43:02] Jason: We said, okay, well, hold on. Here's all your songs. You don't have to leave feedback anymore. You'll get a little bit for listening to them, but then when you share one, you'll get a bigger one. we had this really complicated algorithm where I was shaving money off, let's say you're a curator and you earn 0.

[00:43:15] Jason: 50 per submission, influencers would earn 0. 25 per submission, and I would take that 0. 25 and put it in a little pool for them, and then when they approved, they got to release that bucket. it was a pretty complicated thing, and people didn't really understand it. So then we shifted again, and we rolled out this thing called guaranteed shares, and we said, okay.

[00:43:32] Jason: If an influencer declines your song, you get your money back. If they say yes, you have to pay them. And so we came up with all these things. And influencers want 100, 200, 500, 1000 to share a song. And we weren't comfortable with that. So we came in saying, OK, cool. It's like 2, maybe And so we rolled with that for quite a while.

[00:43:50] Jason: But what we found was that… We were attracting a lot of low quality influencers from developing parts of the world where 1 or 2 was actually worth more than it was in [00:44:00] the States. But in America and Canada and the UK and Australia, we were struggling to attract any influencers. They weren't interested in using SubmitHub.

[00:44:07] Jason: They're not going to share a song for 5 or even 10 or even 20. You're asking someone with a big fan base to stand up there and do something to a song for 20? Nah, what's that going to buy you, a Big Mac? So they weren't interested in it. And so our latest iteration has seen a pretty major shift in the way that we pay people.

[00:44:26] Jason: Prices have gone up substantially. They're still well below what most agencies are charging. So agencies are still charging 500 per share. We're coming in now at sort of a 20, range per share. it's proving okay. We've probably seen about a 30 percent uptick in the number of submissions that get approved.

[00:44:45] Jason: so influencers are more interested in sticking around. They're more interested in signing up. They're more interested in telling their friends and they're more likely to share these songs. it's one of those things where it's quite difficult to balance, right? From an artist standpoint, what's worth it?

[00:44:57] Jason: I don't think 500 is worth it on a [00:45:00] share. But it's 50 for a biggish one, maybe. And so the way it roughly works now is it's,you could basically say like 50, 000 views is 50. But then it changes if you want to focus on the US or Canada or Australia, those tier one markets, it's going to change a lot.

[00:45:12] Jason: So 50, 000 views is actually going to be more like 150. Three or four weeks ago, I rolled out This price increase, but I also rolled out version two of what We call the budget submissions. on the influencer side, you can either scroll through the list and choose people individually, or you can do what's called a budget submission.

[00:45:28] Jason: And a budget submission means that you tell us how many credits you want to spend, and we take care of filling all the shares for you. I think it's actually a way more efficient way to do it as an artist. You don't have to sit there, spend the time doing it, and we make sure that it goes to pretty decent people.

[00:45:41] Jason: But the way that we're basing that pricing is on views. And so far it's been going really well. So. You know, let's say you have to put in a hundred credits for 50, 000 views. In most cases, we guarantee the 50, 000 views. That's the minimum floor, and in most cases we're exceeding that by a hundred to two hundred percent.

[00:45:58] Jason: So, you're actually getting [00:46:00] more like a hundred or hundred fifty thousand views. the more you spend, the more likely you are to have a viral one, right? it just makes sense. I'm not telling people to spend more. that's Groover's philosophy.

[00:46:10] Jason: But, I've noticed that for the people who spend 500 or 1, 000 credits, they're far more likely to, Hey, we promised you 300, 000 views, but you got 5 million. And that's because, with those 1, 000 credits, we're able to line up about 20 shares, at about 25 each. And the odds of one of those going viral out of 20, is way higher. What does that mean? Going viral. I mean, that's still up in the air. It comes a lot down to the song, that type of thing. But, I'm really liking the way these, influencer submissions are going right now. But again, we still have this balance that we have to strike where we don't have as many influencers as there is demand.

[00:46:46] Jason: that's why the price has been going up. it's sort of classic economics of supply and demand. The demand for us influencers was higher than the number of influencers we had. So, raise the prices. Demand goes down, sort of hits an equilibrium. We're trying to find that equilibrium.

[00:46:59] Jason: I [00:47:00] think we're a bit closer now. I'd just like to see us sign up more of these tier one influencers. And the more of them we can sign up, better we can deliver on these campaigns. I think right now we only have about a hundred from the states.

[00:47:09] James: and I think another way to look at that, because you were saying 50 for 50, 000 views seems like a lot to you, but if you're looking at any ads platform, like a CPM of 1 is not bad at

[00:47:20] James: So if you're

[00:47:21] Jason: that's the CPM. So,

[00:47:23] James: perspective, I think that's a good number.

[00:47:24] Jason: so what we're guaranteeing In tier one markets is ten credits for a thousand views. And in tier two markets, it's three credits for a thousand views. That's the guaranteed minimum, but as I said, it's exceeding it by quite a lot. I had one guy his ended up breaking down to 67 cents per 1, it's pretty good.

[00:47:41] James: fantastic.

[00:47:42] Jason: Yeah.

[00:47:42] James: But it's

[00:47:43] Jason: works really and I'm alsoTikTok doesn't pay on views, they pay on videos. I had this debate internally of, we're trying to go for number of videos, I don't know if this is right, but people like the numbers.

[00:47:53] Jason: If you are a publicist pushing a big campaign for influencers, do you want to go back to your client and say, I got you 3. 5 million views?[00:48:00] You don't want to have to explain, well actually, but hold on, that was only three videos and the spin off from that wasn't really high and your TikTok earnings from that was three cents.

[00:48:08] Jason: That part doesn't work. You want to have that narrative. It's just a nice narrative to come back and say you got 3. 5 million views. They're like, wow, that's excellent. Just hope they don't ask what that actually meant that is really hard to track. the cross platform jump was big in the early days of TikTok. People were blowing up on Spotify, but then you actually look at us and that was the narrative that was being created. That's not the reality. I think it was like 17 songs blew up in 2021. from TikTok. So it was like just over one a month, but the narrative is that you can blow up on TikTok if you do this.

[00:48:40] Jason: And then I think it was Vox. They did this analysis and they did it, okay, six months off to these guys. How many of them had actually turned that into anything substantial? And it was like, okay, three of them had, and two of them did their first live performance and flopped because they weren't even meant to be a band.

[00:48:55] Jason: It was just a joke song. But we're trying to create a product that we think is, worth it for the [00:49:00] cost. And so far the reception's been pretty good. I think people are kind of into it. big trick here is how are we going to sign up more US influencers?

[00:49:06] Jason: I don't have the easy answer there.

[00:49:08] James: that's the tough one, and if I had more famous friends, I would send them all your way. Unfortunately,

[00:49:14] Jason: yeah, and that's also a problem, right? We do have quite a few musicians apply to join, but it's not the right content. accounts are centered around their musicianship and so it's just a bit weird to be lip syncing someone else's song.

[00:49:24] Jason: It's also not big influencers we're looking for, but we're looking for people who consistently pull 000 views on their videos. That's sort of the sweet spot. There's millions of them out there. this is like that 80, 20 thing it's, worth more of our time to focus on making the core product better than it is for us to sit down and try to cold call a bunch of influencers.

[00:49:42] Jason: absolutely agreed. Well, Jason, I gotta say thank you so much for coming back on the show. It's been a pleasure speaking with you again. And I'm excited to see what the future of SubmitHub holds. And I'm

[00:49:53] Jason: Me too.

[00:49:54] James: What the listeners of this

[00:49:55] Jason:

[00:49:55] James: episode think of SubmitHub, if you haven't tried it yet, go check it out for your next [00:50:00] release, let me know.

[00:50:01] James: We have a Bandhive Discord server uh, that'll be linked in the show notes at bandhive. rocks slash 207. You can come there either yell at me uh, how terrible SubmitHub is and you didn't get any approvals, or praise it, tell me how much you loved it and you're so thankful that we had Jason on the show. Uh, I'm open to either, but I hope it's the latter.all the links for SubmitHub. com, that one's super easy, that'll be in the show notes at bandhive. rocks slash 207 as And I'll drop in some articles about SubmitHub that Jason, you've mentioned as Uh, I will do my best to find those specific articles drop those links into the show And then I also do have a free SubmitHub course on how to get approved, which… Uh, You can find that at bandhive.

[00:50:39] James: rocks slash SubmitHub. Jason, do you have anything you want to say? anywhere else people should go? Anything they should check before we part ways for the day?

[00:50:47] Jason: no, I'm done. It's almost bedtime here.

[00:50:49] James: ten of nine in South Africa. It's

[00:50:52] James: late. Well, thank you for staying up until your

[00:50:54] Jason: of 9.

[00:50:55] Jason: It is, yes, but it is 10 of 9. It's true. Is that the German way of saying it? I bet that is the German [00:51:00] way, huh?

[00:51:00] James: In German, one would say 10 vor, which is like 10 of,

[00:51:03] Jason: I think Afrikaans is

[00:51:04] Jason: similar, but I mean in the States you'd say 10 Or 8.

[00:51:08] James: Oh, 10 to 9. 10 till. Yeah. Good point. I said 10 of.

[00:51:12] Jason: Yeah, see, that's what I

[00:51:13] James: never thought about

[00:51:14] Jason: your German's kicking in, yeah.

[00:51:15] James: Yeah. I've also found out that the word water, I have an accent when I say water. That's like the only word I have an accent on.

[00:51:23] Jason: I find it funny the way Americans say it. Water. It's a w a d d e r. Water.

[00:51:27] James: Yeah, you're gonna water into the room like you waddle into the room.

[00:51:31] Jason: No, you waddle.

[00:51:32] James: think this is where we should leave this episode before it goes downhill and it crashes and burns We don't want that to happen. But Jason, thank you so much. like I said, it's been a pleasure Good to have you back on the show.

[00:51:42] James: And here's to seeing the continued growth of submit hub

[00:51:46] Jason: Thanks, James. See you in two and a half years.