In the previous post I wrote about submithub, I stated that I’d soon write about some of the “experiences” I had to go through while using the service and that I’ll explain what I meant when I said that I love “Testing” people.
You see: submithub users, especially the curators, love masquerading their rejection with all kinds of motivations and often acting high and mighty in front of artist by telling them how much they “know better” in terms of music production, mixing, mastering and, often, by calling themselves “pros” of their craft.
These kind of users love writing feedback that “seem” pretty specific, stuff like “that sound at min…” or “the power of the kick” or other such bullshit to motivate them just, well, not wanting to accept tracks while still wanting the money of the submission (just like I explained in this first submithub post)
These kinds of feedback may be jenuine, but I strongly believe that there’re times, many times, when everything is just made up and when this happen, it can lead to pretty bad self esteem issues, not to mention doubts about one self abilities and pretty bed adjustments on one’s craft that will destroy their value in the long term.
That is why, when I can, I come up with ways to “Test” these people to find out if they feedback is legit or not.
In this blog post I’ll be narrating you the tale of three real life experiences that relates to submithub:
The first one will make you understand how many curators do not even listen to your music before rejecting it with made up reasons.
The second one will make you understand how people, when trying to find reasons to reject you instead of really listening to the music, will just create delusions for themselves in order to motivate their rejections.
The third one will expose how some people who call themselves “pro” in what they do, may very well be self-ego-boosted idiots that literally have no clue about what they’re doing… but, go figure, they make a living selling their “non existant abilities” to others as if they really were professional engineers.
Let’s start.
A little premise
After the previous posts about submithub I have had people come to me in shock asking why I care to expose these things, since it just “makes us look bad” in their opinion.
I’ve even had the submithub team come at me stating that I was just acting out of frustration, cause they are so transparent in everything that they do.
So let me tell you this: the entire eLxAr project, exists as a socially oriented project to use art not only to entertain, but to tackle relevant social issues.
Our songs talks about war, manipulation, mass media and more… as such it really puzzles me how people believe they can just come at us trying to scam us the same way they scam other artists, and be shocked that we’ll call them out on their little petty schemes.
I make myself no problem writing a song about how governments use mass media to manipulate people’s thoughts… you’re delusional if you believe I will make myself problems writing blog posts that will expose someone’s scam’s attempts.
Frustration, as the submithub team says? Perhaps: frustration about a world and society were ethics and morals seem to be nonexistant anymore, scams are considered to be “business plans” and where people get pissed at whoever is that exposes truths, instead of getting pissed at whoever is that tries to scam them.
With this let me announce that seeing the latest events, with the submithub team putting all their effort into justifying and protecting a scammer that literally admitted to his scam in chat instead of punishing him, the next blog post will make names and tell you EXACTLY why you should NEVER, and I mean NEVER, put even a single cent into such a service.
Let’s now start with the stories I promised you.
YOur totally silent song is beautiful, but not a fit for my playlist
This short first story will hopefully make you understand how many curators don’t even listen to your music before making up ways to reject it.
Some time ago, as I always used to do after a new release, I uploaded it on submithub and sent it to curators.
After a little while, one of the curators replied to me stating that there was definitely something wrong with the file, cause it was completely silent, and that he’d refund my credits. Hats down to the guy, showing that there are honest curators too, at least for now.
Anyway, I went and checked on the song and he was right: something had gone wrong with the file upload and the audio file was completely silent.
Being afraid of losing my credits over a silent song, I got in touch with submit hub support team asking what to do, and they replied that yeah, the track was really completely silent on their part too and that I could just delete the song and re-upload correctly, all my credits would have been refunded when the song got deleted.
So that is exactly what I did.
As I was searching for a way to delete my entry from the website tho, another curator replied to my submission.
It was a refusal. It was motivated kinda like this: “thanks for submitting your music to me. It is a very beautiful track, sadly not really a fit for my playlist, but thank you for sending it my way“.
Something is not right here, isn’t it? We’re dealing with a corrupted audio file that is, as submithub themselves admitted, completely silent, but someone decided that it was “great” but “not a good fit”.
I hope you see were I’m going here: services such as submithub work on the assumption that curators get paid “for their time listening”… but what would happen if they just did not listen and still get paid?
It does not take a genius to just hit play, perhaps on a silenced browser, do whatever it is they are doing: working on their own music, playing videogames, watch a tv show… and then in 5 minutes go back and be like: “oh yeah dude, awesome work, but I did not really find it fit my playlist”.
You do not spend the time, you still get paid, you can fund your own ads for your own music… and you’re happily scamming artists in a way that, unless something specific like my file getting corrupted happens, no one will ever be able to find out.
Thinking back to this very specific event, I’d say that submithub LOVE for scammers and their attitude towards wanting to protect them at all costs, really started to shine trough because go figure: after I wrote on our twitter account what had happened, instead of getting pissed about it and wanting to do something, as any healthy service would do to protect its own userbase, the reaction was to leave a comment trying to make up possible justifications for the guy.
Things like: “well but perhaps after finding out the file was silent he went ahead and looked for the song on streaming platforms and heard it there”.
Something that was debunked instantly bu the fact that the listening time on the silent file was at, if I remember correctly, around 4 minutes. I find it pretty hard that someone would listen to silence for 4 minutes before deciding “hey, gonna go search for it on social media”.
I’ll give you a hint submithub: if you side with scammers, then you’re scammers.Want to claim you have a honest and transparent serice as you love to do? Then start ACTING against scammers, instead of always, constantly, justifying and protecting them.
I hope this little story from my own personal experience helps you realize that nope, when you get reject it does not mean your music is bad. there’s chances the curator did not even listen to it.
Song is nice but you totally fucked up the timing on that delay at min 1:20 that does not even exist
Ok now this is going to be a very short story. It was kind of funny honestly.
Sent a song to a curator as usual, got replied that the song was nice but there was a delay at a specific time of the song that was totally out of tempo and was messing everything up.
Got a little “pro” lesson on how you should always synth your delays to the track tempo to avoid these kinds of things.
I read it all, went back into the production project just to be sure, and confirmed there was no delay on that specific sound the guy was talking about.
Replied to him asking if perhaps he was referring to another section of the song, trying to give him a chance, but he was adamant on both the sound and the timing.
So sent the song to different people asking if they heard that delay and literally everyone replied that they did not.
Wrote to the guy again, telling him that literally there was no delay in that song, that I could confirm it with the production project, that it was confirmed bu at least another 10 producers.
Never heard from the guy again.
Could not do anything about it sadly, but I def never submitted him another song after this happened.
You see: this is the issue with people trying to “act” pros and trying to provide “specific” feedback in order to justify their made up rejections: it’s extremly easy to fuck up.
If you just keep it at “It was not to my taste“, then it’s subjective, no one will EVER be able to call you out on your taste.
But if your goal is to act high and mighty, trying to make people think you’re this kind of super pro that has super sensitive ears and can ear anything and start going in with “specific” kind of feedback that is nothing but OBJECTIVE, then you’re literally exposing yourself to being called out as an idiot, cause it’s super easy to prove you’re just making things up.
A MASTERCLASS IN EGO AND INCOMPETENCE
I would have loved to give this third final story a more “funny” title but this is just too long and controversial for that.
We’re talking here, about one pretty “big” kind of name in the synth scene. Not the kind of “super” big, but “pretty” big. Respected artist, tons of people I know would never believe this actually happened if I told them the name of the artists, but it did. All real stuff that I experienced in first person.
I had sent multiple tracks to this guy for judgement and inclusion in his own playlist and almost always got shut down with pretty specific feedback about balancing of volumes and other similar things.
Something about this feedback kinda tickled me the wrong way tho, cause if I tried to follow those instructions and solve problems in the track after, then those other songs would still be wrong for any other reason. As such, in the end, I decided to test this artist to check the good faith of the actions.
Also note that from now on I’ll just refer to this artist as “him” merely to make it easier for me to write, but that does not mean I’m talking about a male.,
What I did was very simple: I got in touch with him asking if there was any way to get some private feedback before I released a song, so that I could be sure it was well made.
After getting this pretty egocentric message about his job being professional sound engineer and people paying him hundreds of euros/dollars for counseling, I was told that I could just use submithub to send a song before releasing for a couple of bucks, so I did.
Horrible song in his opinion, the kick was too weak, I had to adjust tons of volumes and other such things. I thanked him saying that I’d definitely work on it using his suggestions then went ahead and uploaded the exact same song, just after re-exporting the master so that the dates would not have been the same, on all streaming services and waited for release.
Notice that, at this point in time, I did not make ANY CHANGE to the song AT ALL.
When the song finally released, I submitted it to him with a message stating that I was extremely thankful for his help, that his suggestions really helped me improve the song and that I believed it really did show in the final master.
Again: notice that I made no changes at all, I just made him believe that I did.
What do you think happened?
“This has improved so much! I’m glad I could help you out, you really followed my advice there” and got accepted.
AMAZING how the main of an egomaniac person works uh? I am SO GLAD to have spent tons of years researching psychology subjects so that I could enjoy these kinds of behaviors to their fullest brightness.
This would not even be the end of it, cause after some months something else happened, but I believe this story should be enough for you to understand how people calling themselves “pro” probably have no clue at all about what they’re doing .
Did you learn anything?
I hope these three experiences I’ve had to deal with while using submithub have tought you something.
Luckily there’re some nice people on the service too, and I believe I did meet at least a couple ones, but you really should never allow anyone there to modify what it is that YOU think about your craft and about your music.
You’re not there to be scammed: test these people, if someone rubs you the wrong way, stop feeding them with your money and your time.
Let them starve, only go for the ones that know what mutual benefit, ethic and morale mean.
I’ll see you in the next blog post were I’ll be telling you the whole “Genre Scamming” story.
Since submithub seem to be set into protecting this scammer instead of punishing him, this time I’ll make names of both the scammer, the playlist and all the submithub support team member to whom I talked to.
All the best,
Luca
