Here is what it’s like to send your music to a curator:
You: “Hello, Playlist Mister Manager ma’am,
I love the work you’ve done in crafting your playlist, ‘New Funk Pop 2024.’ The care you’ve put into it shines through in every song, but nowhere is your craft more evident than in your placement of the song ‘All Ur Luv’ immediately after ‘Music on the Radio.’ The melodic similarities of the tracks belie their thematic juxtaposition, with the contrast bringing each one to new, sparkling life.
The combination took my breath away. I think I speak for all 1,132 of your playlist followers when I say that your arrangement is a work of art.
After listening to all 237 tracks on your playlist, I’d like to humbly submit my own song, “Literally a perfect new funk pop song,” for inclusion on your list. I wrote it after my brother’s best friend’s dog died in a balloon art accident.
It’s about the brevity and sacredness of life, and especially the lives of small dogs. It was co-written with Ryan Reynolds and produced by Rick Rubin in Boise, Idaho.
I think it’d fit well after track 134, but I of course defer to your playlisting genius.
Thank you for your consideration. I will check my DMs every half hour for the next seven days in the hopes of hearing from you soon.”
Curator: [No response]
You: Hello again, Mister Doctor ma’am! It’s been a week or 336 half hours, and I just wanted to follow up on my submission in case it slipped through the cracks.
Would you be willing to consider my song, “Literally a perfect new funk pop song,” for inclusion in your playlist, “New Funk Pop 2024”?
I’ll wait in quiet desperation for your response, and I appreciate your work, as always.”
Curator: “Not gr8 fit for list, sry. Wrong genre.”
Curator: “Actually, 1 slot open for $150, paypal if interested. Thx.”
This is, of course, only a caricature of these sorts of conversations.
But as somebody who’s been on both sides of the dialogue (as an artist and as a music blog editor), I can tell you that it’s not that much of a caricature.
At Two Story, we get a couple (or a couple dozen) of very real, very heartfelt, and very well-researched music submissions every day. For the most part, being the awful, email-challenged person that I am, I don’t respond. I’m busy and my inbox is full.
I am aware that this is very bad.
(Having been on the artist side of things, I have earned this awareness firsthand. Somehow it hasn’t made me much better at responding, but I do think it’s made me feel more guilty.)
Anyway, today, I wanted to offer a simple way to help you avoid these sorts of conversations – or, at least, to avoid being the person who instigates these sorts of conversations as the submitter.
The solution is pretty simple:
Become your own curator.
And the point of today’s email is to give you two relatively easy ways to do it.
The first (and I think easiest) way to become your own curator is to spend money. That’s right:
- Run ads to your own genre playlists.
I’ve covered this approach in detail before here. But the gist is that you create playlists in your own genre featuring similar artists and your own music, then run conversion ads to them.
Because you’re advertising a genre and are featuring artists who will be familiar to your target audience, your cost per result will tend to be much lower than it would be for your own music.
(On Meta, a CPR of $0.21 would be great for direct-to-song ads; a CPR of $0.07 is realistic for a playlist.)
This means you can pretty easily get a high volume of streams – especially if you feature, say, 10 of your own tracks mixed in among 50 total songs.
And things really start to blow up when you create a network of playlists in your genre. Here, for instance, are a few playlists I’m currently working on using this method:
Over the next few months, I’m gearing up to release a few of my own songs. If I add each new track to each playlist, the streams should add up quickly.
And if you want to see how this tactic can really snowball, check out Andrew Southworth’s interview with Jend, an EDM artist who’s grown to 2m+ monthly listeners relying heavily on his own playlists.
As I’ve mentioned before, one major drawback of this approach is that it costs money to get started. But on the flip side, once you grow a list to 1k+ followers, you can actually make money by becoming a curator on platforms like SubmitHub.
The second tactic, though, doesn’t even require any cash upfront to get started.
- Start a social profile focused on music curation.
I really started to get excited about this strategy when I heard Jesse Cannon outline it in this video.
There’s some nuance here (Jesse’s talking about this in the context of paid advertising), but the basic premise is that you create a TikTok account and make videos that showcase music in your genre. The trick is that some of the songs you feature are, of course, your own.
For example, a video might be: “Five songs with sick drum solos and each one gets increasingly complex.” Then you feature five songs with cool drum solos, with one song being your own track.
And you might also include a note (usually in the form of a comment) that users can search for your playlist on Spotify to hear more of these songs. Or you might have a linktree in your profile going out to playlists you’ve made for fans of the genre.
I think this is a great idea.
But take it with a grain of salt, because, honestly, I haven’t tried it yet myself.
(It’s on my docket of things to try this fall, but it’s contingent on whether or not I can talk myself into making a TikTok account… so the chances of it actually happening are probably pretty slim.)
From what I’ve observed, though, it’s not all that hard to build one of these profiles, because a) the videos are pretty easy to make, and b) TikTok’s organic reach is so good. A couple of videos in, and it seems like you can start reaching fans of your style of music.
Here are a few examples of profiles that are doing this:
There are a million accounts doing similar things, but you get the idea.
All right, that’s all I’ve got for this week.
The main takeaway: It’s very possible to be your own curator. And often, growing an audience as a curator is easier than promoting your own music directly.
So pick either one of those tactics and give it a shot for the rest of the year.
If you stay consistent, it’s very feasible that you can grow a sizable audience of music fans by 2025 – and you can go from getting ghosted by curators to feeling guilty for ghosting other artists.
It’s a hard world out there. As always, here’s wishing you good luck.
