One Submit Review: 3 Things That Made Spotify Playlisting Fast And Easy

Even with Spotify being criticized frequently lately for its payout issues and other drama, it’s still the undisputed champ of music streaming. While YouTube music is a close second, more industry people consider Spotify monthly listeners a more impactful success metric than YouTube streams.

Learn More About One Submit Here

So, with the launch of our new record label, Magnetic Magazine Recordings, we wanted to make our first release as big of a splash as possible on Spotify. While I’ve used SubmitHub in the past, I wasn’t that big of a fan of the user experience overall, and One Submit seemed like a breath of fresh air and an option I was open to trying out and writing a full review on afterward.

Let’s spend a moment to chat about what exactly One Submit is before diving into the three things that I thought made One Submit stand out in a sea of other online promo services, some things that could have been improved, and then my final thoughts on who this service and platform are right now. And while One Submit offers a TON of pitching services to anything from YouTube Curators to radio stations, we wanted to dial in on Spotify specifically as it’s what most artists are focused on these days. We wanted to focus on driving listeners in that direction. Let’s go!

What Is One Submit

One Submit is a platform designed to simplify the music promotion process for artists. It allows musicians to submit their songs to various curators and influencers efficiently. The platform was created to address the challenge of finding a reliable service to manage music promotion across multiple channels, saving artists time and effort.

One Submit offers a self-service solution where artists can release their music to various platforms, including Spotify playlists, YouTube channels, TikTok influencers, blogs, radio stations, and record labels, all from one place. Each submission comes with a curator’s written review, hopefully providing valuable feedback.

The platform emphasizes transparency and quality by monitoring curators and playlists. For example, Spotify playlists with more than 300 songs are not accepted, and YouTube channels are evaluated based on average streams rather than subscriber count to ensure genuine engagement.

While One Submit does not guarantee specific playlist placements, it ensures every submission is listened to and reviewed correctly. The platform also checks for suspicious bot activity to maintain the integrity of its services. Overall, One Submit prioritizes the artist’s needs in the music promotion process.

With the more techy descriptions of what this platform does, let’s dive into the fun parts of what I loved about the whole process.

One Submit Review – The Pros

It’s Incredibly Simple

There are many different online playlisting platforms that have different ways of doing the job. Companies like Groover and Submithub allow you to pitch directly to various curators to “conveniently ” get your music onto playlists. Still, the process usually requires a lot of legwork to find the right curators and write pitches.

One Submit streamlines the whole process by allowing you to pitch in bundles once you’ve included a few necessary filters like genre, how many playlists you want to pitch to, and a short track description. You then select your budget, which defines how many playlists you want to pitch to. Choose a date when you want the campaign to launch, and you’ll be off to the races! You don’t need to hand-select playlists and manually reach out to each, which takes much of the busy work away from the process.

They Have A Wide Range Of Curators

There are a TON of curators and genres on One Submit, which is great if you’re an artist with multiple aliases or for labels releasing a broad range of genres.

At Magnetic Magazine Recordings, we release everything from melodic house to organic house and even a bit of progressive. Sure, it’s all roughly in the same niche, but having the flexibility to use the same platform for all our campaigns will undoubtedly be great for everything we have in the pipeline.

Social Sharing Is Streamlined

A big part of playing the Spotify playlisting game is sharing and supporting the playlists on which your music is placed. It’s a nice move to support the curators who support you, and One Submit makes it super easy to share the feedback that curators leave on your music.

A button can access any playlist that accepts and supports your music. This is as much to confirm that they did playlist your music as it is for you to post about the playlist on your social media, giving the curator a shoutout. The whole process is fast and easy and can be a great way to show the success and results of your campaign.

The more often you share playlists supporting your music, the more likely they are to include your next release in their playlists, too! So, the fewer steps, the better here, and One Submit made it fast and simple.

The Cons…

There Is No Guarantee

This is far from an only One Submit platform con; it just comes with the territory of marketing anything today.

If you expect to see any meaningful numbers, you’ll likely have to put $75 or more into a campaign. But still, if you’re spending that much money on music marketing, which isn’t much to a major label but can be expensive for a solo artist, then you need to be wary of where you’re investing it. The fact that you’re not guaranteed streams or plays might be a tough pill to swallow for some artists even though it’s just how the industry works.

It would have been more enticing if there were a discount on pitches the more you bought in a campaign, which would have incentivized scaling up a campaign, but still, at roughly $6 a pitch, it’s not too bad. We got support for a sizable amount of playlists, 12 in total (one of which was a very large one), so in the end, it was a solid investment for our track. But there is no promise you will have similar results; that’s how the cookie crumbles.

The Feedback Could Be Better

I had similar frustrations when I used SubmitHub, where curators and influencers were supposed to give you “high value” feedback on why they didn’t support your music, but when you got the feedback, it felt rushed and low quality. Unfortunately, I was a little bummed to see that this was common on here too, and I think it’s more just the meta on these types of platforms. If a pitch costs me $6, I would have liked to see more thought into why it was rejected instead of a string of compliments followed by a “not for us, sorry.”

If the mix wasn’t right, what was wrong with it so we could address it with the professional mixing engineer on call? What about the “vibe” of the track isn’t sitting well with you?

Perhaps it’s just because I have been a professional A&R for multiple labels for a few years now and pride myself on communicating feedback quite well to artists, but it left a bit to be desired here.

Who Is One Submit For?

One Submit is a fantastic platform for anyone who needs a boost on release day, and while I know that might sound like it’s casting a wide net, I think this is where One Submit shines. Securing a handful of medium-sized playlists can be the most challenging part of locking in early. The Spotify algorithm is all about how many playlists and likes your track gets in the initial days of release, and it’s stressful knowing that time is always of the essence.

But that’s precisely what One Submit is so good for, and it can help give you an algorithmic boost one release day by locking in a sizable handful of playlist curators with 5k-10k followers on their playlists on and before release day. It certainly will be trickier to secure massive playlists that may bring in tens of thousands of streams, as that’s almost an entirely different ball game. Still, it can be invaluable to the initial marketing campaign to ensure that a small but essential baseline of plays is met and start getting the algorithm working in your favor.

Music marketing in 2024 and beyond is such a war of attrition that focusing solely on the investment in a single platform or solitary marketing initiative foregoes the complete picture. But seeing as the first release on our label, “Ecdysis” by Toronto-based duo Beije, just recently hit 10k plays, it’s clear that One Submit had a large helping hand in building the initial fire that set this track off and got it to where it’s at now.