If you’ve read my previous blog post related to SubmitHub, then you know that I like their service and that my feeling towards it has always been that the team behind it has done all they can, up until now, to prevent scamming on their website and had to deal with a very bad userbase.
Lately tho, due to circumstances that I’m going to unveil in this blog post, this certainty related to submithub team willingness to do all they can to prevent scamming, is starting to fade.
Sure: submithub, just as similar services, has always had some shady aspects to it but at least, and one of the reasons why I do not think it’s possible to talk about scamming for the majority of the time, everything goes back to subjective views on music and as such there’s is no way to prove many activities that “feels” illicit really are “illicit”.
I’ve had my share of absurdities happening on Submithun in the months I’ve been a user on their platform and in the near future I’m going to disclose some to all of you via this blog, but up until now, precisely for the “subjective” nature of the service, I’ve gone as far as to call someone a scammer only once because let’s face it: it hurts to read nonsensical reviews about our work and we all know it’s like… made up most of the times, but since everyone ears things differently, has different setups and has different tastes… there is no way to call someone out for “scamming”.
What would happen tho if one of these scammers would be so smart as to admit his scamming in chat because, for some strange reason, he does not believe his practices to be on the “scam” side?
I believe this is such a case, and that the screenshots I could take from the chat is definitive proof of a kind of musician scam that I’ll call, from now on, “GENRE SCAMMING“.
Let’s get to explaining it all, right after I make you all notice that we’ve come to the point that scamming others has become so normal, that people do not recognize it as scamming, but a legit act to gain benefits. And this is just very sad.
The fundations of trust
As we all know, Submithub aims at linking together musicians and curators in a way that everyone could benefit: curators get paid for their time listening to submissions while artists if their work is deemed worthy, get some stream, some visibility, and some royalties in return.
All nice and dandy on the surface, if not for the case that this kind of system is extremely easy to take advantage of and that there are tons of issues related to conflict of interests when curators are also artists, but I’ve talked enough about this issue in the previous post: “is submithub a scam or a legit service?“
Considering the massive amount of nonsense refusal that only a braindead person could accept as legit, trust has always been an issue between curators and artists, but since judgment is subjective, there has never been a way to call many behaviors out as “scams”, especially because the foundations of trust on the service were never really destroyed so far.
We, as artists, knew that we could enter the curator database, search through it per genre or similar artist, send our music over, and wait for judgment.
No matter how happy we were about the feedback we got in return, we could think that if our work was judged on its quality and/or personal taste, so yeah, we got angry but that was it.
Now, thanks to genre scamming, you will never again be able to believe that your work was judged on its quality and/or personal taste, and this means that the little trust that was left between artists and curators will, as soon as you understand what genre scamming is, be broken forever.
GENRE SCAMMING
Imagine this: a curator has a beautiful, relaxing, lush, playlist full of ambient music. He gets taken as a curator on submithub with it, he adds “ambient” as an accepted genre, then wait.
He gets some submissions, which means some earnings, but not that many, so he starts thinking about how to increase the amount of income he could make with his playlist and this is what he decides to do: he adds new “accepted genres” to the playlist, stating that he now accepts also trance, EDM, and/or synthwave music.
He starts getting 4x the submissions, which means that he is getting 4x the income, but mind you: he has absolutely NO WILL to accept trance, EDM, or synthwave music in his playlist, cause his playlist, is an AMBIENT playlist, while trance, EDM and synthwave, are way more reliant on beats and energy than ambiances, so he starts refusing almost all of the submissions he receives, making up excuses for the refusal.
He will probably just accept 1 once in a while so that statistically he can say he accepts those genres, but that is it: this curator is now getting 4x the income for a service that he is not willing to offer, while musicians get scammed hard on their money and time.
Imagine composing a lovely piano track, submitting it to a playlist accepting solo piano as a genre, and getting refused because: “I only accept piano music played on a Bosendorfer built in 1902, sorry.”
Imagine creating a Hip Hop kind of track, and getting refused because “Sorry, I only accept the kind of hip hop with lush, melodic, kind of vocals. Not Hip Hop with rapping on”.
I hope you can see how nonsensical all of this is, cause it’s nothing but “cheating” the system turning something that is purely objective, being the characteristics of a genre, into something purely subjective, destroying what a music genre is at its core, just to have a reason to keep getting money while refusing almost everything at the same time.
I have no doubt this happens already and from quite a lot of time on the platform, but unless a curator was “smart” enough to admit the mechanism, there was absolutely NO WAY, to call anyone out for it, cause no one could have proof of it, since refusal would be justified with made up mixing advice or personal taste, definitely not cause of “genre of track”.
What would happen, as an example, if someone stated to accept “Trance” music would refuse a song saying “It is too energetic” or “the kick and driving bass are too impactful, I only want that kind of “ambient” trance track” which doesn’t even exist in the first place 99.9% of the time?
Pure nonsense. Pure folly.
As said tho, I have been so lucky to find this “smart” kind of curator.
You won’t have to imagine anything now, cause all I’m going to write here is something that happened for real, with screenshots to prove it.
"I state to accept vocal heavy genres, but refuse songs that are vocal heavy because they have vocals"
I know, reading the title to this section makes you think: “who on hear might be this dumb?” well, someone actually does.
Notice that in this blog post, at least for now, I am not going to make names even if I could, because I still want to keep a little glint of hope to myself that the submithub team will come to their senses and take action against this awful schemes but I definitely will if nothing gets done.
As you might know, our music is mainly synthwave/synthpop.
Let’s define these genres:
We could say that synthwave and synthpop are two faces of the same coin, with synthwave being the instrumental side, inspired by movie soundtracks and games of the past, while synthpop being the vocal-heavy one, inspired by the pop scene of the past for the most time.
I actually went around asking artists to define these genres, both in between fellow artists on our RetroSynth label and that we know on social media, and everyone agreed on this.
As such, stating to accept “synthpop” as a genre, but refusing “vocal-heavy” tracks, is pure nonsense, pure folly… but this is what happens.
I have been in touch with this curator for quite a long time, and everything was fine and dandy with him accepting some songs, and refusing some songs… until he suddenly decided to stop accepting tracks with vocals.
Since we were in good relationship, after having one specific song refused I went ahead and asked him the reason why: he replied that he decided not to get any more vocal tracks into his playlist, and the first thing I told him, IMMEDIATELY, was that it was ok, but he should get off the “synthpop” genre from his accepted genres if he took that decision, otherwise a time would have vome when someone would have called him out as a scammer.
He replied that he was “thinking” about it (demonstrating that he knew full well that it was not right), but he was unsure cause, in his opinion, and let me add in a TOTALLY WRONG AND BIASED opinion, synthpop was not a genre that relied on vocals.
And then?
Months passed by, until I had a nice synthpop song on my hand, full of synths, with a nice synth solo, and since I love testing other people to see how honest they are (you’ll get what I mean when I start writing about other experiences I had on submithub, real soon I promise!), I decided to send it to this curator.
The refusal was almost instant, and want to know the best thing of all? He did not even spend time to come up with an excuse: he straight up refused a synthpop song submitted to a playlist that states to accept synthpop as a genre, because it had “vocals”, so basically he clearly stated that he refused a synthpop song, in a playlist that states to accept synthpop, not because he did not like it, but because it was, well… a synthpop song!
Let me say once again: NONSENSE and FOLLY!
I was pretty pissed off and wrote to the guy again, things got heated up cause somehow he had now come to the point as to believe his folly was right and that his behavior was “fine”, so that was it, I was left with no choice but to directly reach out to the submit hum support team hoping that they would make things right.
How did it go?
Well, here I am writing this blog post so even if I won’t tell, you can guess whose’s side they decided to take on the matter.
This blog post here is the last chance I’m giving them to literally “come to their senses” before I modify it taking away all censorship from the screenshots, publicly stating the name of the scammer, the name of his playlist, the screenshot of the discussion I had with the submithub team on the matter and the names of the submithub team’s member that I dealt with.
Artists do not exist to be scammed
Artists all around the world are not there to be scammed by the first money-angry and greedy curator who wants to earn more money by tricking both them and the system and I believe we’ve come to a point where everyone should really come together to say “STOP” to all of this, because as if streaming platform cheating on royalties and bot scams are not enough, we’re now coming to the era of artists scamming artists, and this is were I believe we all should draw a line.
I ask of you now: leave a comment, share this blog post, make your voice heard and show that this is not something of no importance at all, cause it’s your life and your value as an artist that’s on the line.
Let’s make artists’s voices be heard!
All the best,
Luca
P.S. In the end Submithub decided to use all their energies into defending this guy instead of investing them to make their website more secure for musicians, and as such you can find the whole story, with all names and screenshots, in this article were I ask you to judge: Is Submithub against musicians?
