Move Over Submithub! Here's How to Properly Promote Your Music With Groover (part 2)
In part 1, we covered how to launch a Groover campaign to promote a new song to blogs, magazines, playlists, and other outlets. But the real excitement comes from receiving responses!
Whether you find the process enjoyable depends entirely on your perspective and how you handle feedback—both good and bad. And trust me, it's going to be quite a journey!
Sending Out the Campaign
Without further ado, I loaded up a carefully crafted campaign of 53 curators from all walks of music promotion and across all the world (which is something Groover really excels in), blogs, playlisters, channels, etc, and made sure the track details were correct. I took a deep breath, gathered my hopes, and hit the "Send My Track" button!
Please note at this point that Hello is the lead single of my band's latest EP and has now been out for a month. Our basic promotion lies with Facebook Ads but blog coverage and playlist placement is a required step if you want what's best for your music. If it works, it works really well.
Btw, I love the fireworks when you land on the "campaign sent" page!
Waiting for Responses
Immediately after submitting the campaign, I received an automated email from Groover verifying that my campaign was sent and that the 53 curators had 7 days to respond.
"You will receive your feedback in the next 7 days. After that period, if any curators/pros were not able to listen to your track, you will get your Grooviz back for those submissions"
I let a few hours pass while sporadically checking my email, but I was surprised that I didn't get any notifications from Groover. Although I'm accustomed to receiving a flood of rejection emails when submitting to blogs—which can take a toll on your mindset—I appreciate that Groover takes a different approach. Instead of sending rejection emails, it allows you to check the campaign results on the platform at your own pace.
Checking Feedback
With the ball in our court, I headed over to see what was happening at Groover.co. The notification icon was active with the number 8, so upon pressing it I saw 7 curators "Gave feedback" on your track Hello. I wasn't sure if that was positive or negative so I checked each one to see.
Rating the Feedback
By clicking on a notification you are taken to a message thread between you and the curator. While this appears like an interesting user interface, you cannot reply to the curator, rather you can rate their response, with the rating being visible only to Groover.
I understand the mechanics behind this decision but wouldn't it be cool to be able to chat with a curator that rejected you to really find out more about their decision? I can't help but feel many responses were generic, but anyhow that's how this model works, and that's why Groover enables you to rate the curator's response.
So I went ahead and rated any response that didn't convince me of its authenticity. If that's your only weapon you might as well use it!
Upon clicking the rating, a new screen appears prompting to say more about our rating by clicking on any of the 12 icons:
- Kind,
- Honest,
- Attentive listening,
- Detailed feedback,
- Useful to help me improve,
- Advised to contact other pros,
- Not descriptive or non-constructive,
- Generic or copy-paste response,
- Enthusiastic without opportunity,
- Contradicted what's on their profile,
- Offered paid services,
- Didn't listen to the track
I chose 'Generic or copy-paste response', and then I saw a submit button that read "Send to Groover" which made me feel guilty for a second. That second quickly passed though :)
The First Approval
As I moved up the list of message threads between me and the other curators, amidst a sea of red "Feedback" labeled threads stood a bright green row with the words "Promise to share". I jumped up my seat with newfound joy. A playlist curator had accepted Hello for inclusion into their playlist.
Not all was rosy though:
"* generally takes about 42 days to share a track. Groover will send * a reminder after 21 days."
Isn't that a huge delay? Nevertheless, it was a small victory so I treated it as such, especially when I saw the curator had a 7% acceptance rate, the playlist around 10.000 followers and was very closely related to Hello. It was definitely a success!
I moved swiftly through the other rejection messages, handed some bad ratings where appropriate, and called it a day. Let's see what will happen the next day, we still have 50 curators to go!
At this point, I have to praise Groover for how they handle the user experience on curator rejection. Negative messages are marked as "Feedback", and positive as "Promise to share". You don't get hoards of rejection emails when you wake up the next morning and most importantly I have the impression curators are more polite on Groover.
So much so that I did not feel offended or let down reading any of their rejection messages. Prompts such as "Don't fret! X curator is very selective and shares fewer than 10% of the tracks they receive." actually go a long way towards making rejection feel like a natural part of the process.
Conclusion
After 1 week or so, almost all curators had responded. Interestingly, all the approvals came from playlisters, which aligns perfectly with our promotion strategy. The experience overall was positive and insightful. While there were rejections, the respectful and constructive nature of the feedback made it all a positive learning experience.
In the end, I felt that using Groover for music promotion is absolutely worth it. It opens up a world of opportunities and provides a platform to connect with professionals who can genuinely elevate your music's reach. Since the platform offers so many different types of promotion outlets, it's up to the quality of the song itself to find its way to the right curator.
Does this mean it will find its way to the right audience? Perhaps not, but you will never know if you don't try!
Sign up to Groover here, and if you are releasing music soon you might benefit from our specially crafted 10% discount coupon code MUSICNGEARVIP (see here how to apply it)
So have you used Groover? What are your thoughts?
About Chris Roditis
Chris Roditis has been an active musician since 1995 in various bands and projects across a variety of genres ranging from acoustic, electronic to nu metal, british rock and trip hop. He has extensive experience as a mixing engineer and producer and has built recording studios for most of the projects he has been involved with. His passion for music steered his entrepreneurial skills into founding MusicNGear in 2012.
Contact Chris Roditis at chrisroditis@kinkl.com
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