What spending $100 on playlist submissions will get you [Case Study]

Fiona Z spent $100 on three different playlist submission sites: Groover, Songrocket, and Submithub and shares the results.

A guest post by Fiona Z of The Musician’s Five Star Assistant.

Today I wanted to share with you a “case study” – if you will – on getting your music added to Spotify playlists. Spotify playlists continue to be a great way for musicians to gain listens, new followers and engagement with their music. But, getting on them or finding quality playlists is not easy.

One of my clients had a release last month and wanted to try and get the track on Spotify playlists with a budget of $100. So, here’s what options we had and what happened.

Getting on an official Spotify playlist wasn’t an option to attempt since my client released the track immediately, and to be considered for a Spotify playlist, you have to submit it at least 2 weeks in advance of the release. They only consider unreleased tracks for their playlists.

So, moving on from that…we researched several sites that offered playlist submission services. We ended with moving forward with the following 3: Groover, Songrocket and Submithub. We split the budget across the three.




SUBMITHUB – Submithub allows you to submit tracks and music videos to blogs, record labels, radio stations, Spotify playlists and YouTube or SoundCloud channels.

For $27 we bought 30 credits and submitted them to 22 curators. Granted, we had some layover credits from previous campaigns so we were able to submit to what Submithub calls ‘Premium’ curators, so in total, we used up 54 credits. 

Results: We got a 100% response rate, and got approved for 1 playlist.

Would we use them again?: Overall, yes. Set up was simple and was reasonably priced. I also liked the fact you could see the genre match, quality level and influence level of each curator. The filters are great too so you can really narrow down what could work for you.

GROOVER  – Groover is a French company that guarantees feedback and visibility from blogs, radios, playlists and labels. 

We spent about $40 USD and were able to submit to 17 curators. We do have some credits left over.

Results: As Groover’s about statement says, you do get feedback, but we’ve had 0 success on placement.

Would we use them again?: No. It really seems better suited for music that you’d like feedback from vs media placement. Set up was quite simple as well, but you are overwhelmed with 1500+ curators, so it’s important to filter down to exactly what you’re looking for.




SONGROCKET – With Songrocket, you can pitch your music as independent, label, PR agency or management to Spotify playlist curators – so they are focused on what we were looking for.

We purchased a plan for $45 where we could pitch up to around 20 playlists / 9 unique curators.

Results: We got a response from 9 curators so far and one playlist placement.

Would we use them again?: Probably not. While setup was simple and appreciated, the cost didn’t match its value.

A runner-up site that we considered using was MusoSoup, however, they required a press release which we felt was not worth our time to write out for a cover song release. This might make more sense for a track that we’d really want a lot more media push around.

How many more plays did we get on the track after those two playlist adds? It was just under 400 additional plays that we gained from the 2 playlists this campaign earned.

Overall, it was really interesting to see how far $100 (actually, a little more) could take us with these playlist submission sites. With anything, I’m sure it depends on the timing, genre and quality of the track, but it’s safe to say that with a limited budget you’re looking at limited results. It would take a lot more money to gain more plays using this strategy.