The short answer
The verdict on SubmitHub is genuinely split: most complaints describe low acceptance rates and blunt feedback that stings on a small budget, while defenders call it the cheapest honest feedback loop they've found. It earns its keep as a feedback and testing tool for artists who can afford to lose the money, not as a guaranteed playlist placement service.
SubmitHub has been getting dragged in music subreddits for close to a decade, and it's also the platform half the artists I talk to still quietly use before a release.
Both things are true.
I think that's actually the interesting part of this whole argument, more interesting than picking a side.
I run curator relations at PlaylistGrow, so I've spent years watching artists spend real credits on SubmitHub and then either shrug it off or swear it off completely. The argument online hasn't changed shape much over that time. What's changed is how confident each side sounds, because now there's a decade of anecdotes backing up whichever position someone already had going in.
The case against it, and it's not wrong
The skeptical case shows up in every thread on r/WeAreTheMusicMakers or r/musicmarketing eventually, and it's consistent: artists spend a batch of credits, submit to a stack of curators, and get back a wall of "not for me" or nothing at all. Small budgets, the ten or twenty dollars an unsigned artist can actually spare, disappear fast when most submissions come back as a no. The complaint shows up in different words every time, but it's always some version of: I paid for feedback, I got nothing, and even when I did get a response it was two sentences that told me nothing useful.
The defenders make a different point, and it's fair too: nobody promised you a yes. SubmitHub has addressed this criticism directly on its own site, acknowledging that some people call it a scam and pushing back on that framing. Their argument is that SubmitHub is the most popular submission platform on the internet, that five minutes of Googling turns up both good and bad reviews, and that sending your music to curators is just a hard experience by nature. Not everyone gets the yes they're hoping for.
What I find genuinely telling is that the complaints and the defense are often about the exact same feature. Take the credit system. One frustrated user, quoted directly on SubmitHub's own site, put it bluntly: "why do you guys force 10 credits to be the LEAST you can buy? all i wanted to do was try the service out to see if its legit and buy like 2 or 3 credits, not 10 for ten dollars. the lack of promoters in the standard category pushes people into buying premium coins." Another put it more bluntly still: "3 credits is huge scam, they take just hypercommercial stuff or their friends." That's the skeptic case in two comments. The entry cost feels designed to push you toward spending more than you meant to, and the rejections feel personal even when they're really just math.
And the math is the part that gets lost in most of these arguments. SubmitHub's own framing of the odds is worth sitting with: "There are 120,000 new songs uploaded to Spotify every day. The odds of standing out as the top 1% (or even 10%) on any given day is no easy task." That's not spin. That's roughly the reality every curator on every platform deals with, whether they're on SubmitHub, working through a service like ours, or just going through their own DMs. Curators can't say yes to everyone. The volume alone guarantees most submissions get a no, no matter which door you knock on.
Where both camps quietly agree
Read enough of this back and forth and you notice something. Nobody, not even the harshest critics, claims curators take the money and ghost without ever responding. The dispute isn't about fraud. It's about expectations.
People who go in expecting a shot at the right playlists, not a guarantee, tend to come away fine with a mixed bag of results. People who go in expecting credits to reliably convert into placements come away feeling burned, because that was never really the deal on offer.
SubmitHub's own advice to artists, tucked into that same page, is basically an admission of this: "those who thoroughly research the curators and target more precisely, as well as returning artists who've learned what worked for them in the past, tend to have significantly higher approval rates." In other words, it rewards people who treat it like a research tool, not a vending machine. That's a reasonable ask. It's just not how most first-timers approach it, which is probably why the loudest complaints tend to come from people on their first or second try.
What the online debate gets right, and what it misses
The skeptics are right that low acceptance rates are the normal outcome, not a sign anything's broken. If you go in expecting most submissions to fail, you won't feel cheated when they do. That's just how any open marketplace for curator attention works, whether it's SubmitHub, cold-emailing curators yourself, or posting for feedback credits somewhere like Hot or Not.
Where I think the online discourse gets a little unfair is treating blunt feedback as a flaw instead of the actual product. A curator telling you a track isn't ready, or isn't right for their playlist, is more useful than silence, even when it stings. In my experience running campaigns across genres, the feedback that actually changes an artist's next release is rarely the polite kind.
One thing the threads don't really cover, because it's not what they're about, is the difference between a self-serve credit marketplace and a managed campaign where someone else handles the curator matching and follow-up. That's a genuinely different product, not a fancier version of the same one. We've run 1,149 campaigns for 1,073 artists since 2019, resulting in 6,560 playlist placements (4,376 of them still active today), mostly across Rap/Hip-Hop, Afrobeats, Pop, R&B and Dance/House. The difference isn't magic access to curators nobody else has. It's that we're doing the targeting and relationship management ourselves instead of leaving an artist to guess which of a thousand curators fits their sound. If you want the fuller comparison of where different services land on that spectrum, we broke it down in our rundown of Spotify promotion services in 2026.
For a wider look at how this whole debate plays out across the bigger Spotify promotion conversation on Reddit, not just around SubmitHub specifically, we covered that separately in what Reddit actually gets right (and wrong) about playlist promotion.
When SubmitHub actually makes sense
Honestly? It makes sense as a cheap, fast feedback loop, especially if you're not sure a track is ready and want opinions from people who hear hundreds of songs a week. Ten dollars for that kind of reality check is a reasonable trade, if you go in treating rejection as data and not an insult.
It makes less sense if you're trying to build an entire release campaign around a handful of credits and hoping something sticks. That's a budget problem more than a platform problem, and it's true of nearly any promotion method, not just this one.
| Approach | Best for | Weakness that keeps coming up |
|---|---|---|
| SubmitHub credits | Fast, cheap feedback on a specific track | Low acceptance rate, feels random on a small budget |
| Cold-emailing curators yourself | Full control, zero platform fee | Time-consuming, no data on who's active or legit |
| Managed campaign (PlaylistGrow model) | Artists who want targeting and follow-up done for them | Costs more than a handful of credits |
If you're weighing this against a bigger release plan, it's worth having something bigger than one submission tool to lean on. We built a free 90-day release countdown checklist for exactly that reason, so promotion isn't the last thing you figure out. And if you'd rather hand the curator targeting to someone else instead of running it credit by credit, that's the whole reason our playlist promotion service exists. Different tool, same math underneath: most submissions get a no, and the only real question is whether you're getting something useful out of the ones that don't.
Common questions
Is SubmitHub worth it for a new artist?
It depends on what you're buying it for. If you want guaranteed playlist adds, no, that's not how it works. If you want cheap, fast feedback on whether a track is ready, and you're prepared for mostly rejections, it can be worth a small budget.
What's the acceptance rate on SubmitHub?
SubmitHub doesn't publish a fixed number, and it varies wildly by curator and genre, but the platform itself acknowledges most submissions won't land a yes given how much music competes for each curator's attention. Expect rejection to be the default outcome, not the exception.
Is SubmitHub a scam, according to Reddit?
No, not in the sense of taking money and delivering nothing. The recurring complaint isn't fraud, it's that the odds are steep and the feedback can sting, which some artists mistake for being scammed when they're really just facing normal rejection rates.
What's a good alternative to SubmitHub?
It depends on whether you want a self-serve marketplace or a managed service. Curated playlist promotion companies like PlaylistGrow work more relationships and less lottery, which suits artists who want a campaign run for them rather than one they run themselves credit by credit.
Sources & discussions referenced
Curator Relations at PlaylistGrow
Talks to playlist curators all day for PlaylistGrow. Knows what makes them press play, press skip, and press delete.
