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For artists, Spotify playlist pitching is one of the fastest ways to build traction on your song, but it can also be a massive money pit if you don’t know what you’re paying for. Between varying prices, vague stream projections, and playlist quality, picking the right pitching service can be confusing.
For independent artists, music marketing usually comes down to one metric: cost per listener. If you aren’t tracking the data, you could be throwing money at strategies that aren’t generating real results.
In this guide, we break down the most popular Spotify submission platforms—comparing real costs and campaign results, so you can invest your release budget where it actually counts.
🥶 YOUGROW PROMO
YouGrow Promo‘s cheapest campaign $103, and offers 2,000-5,000 estimated streams.
Firstly, I don’t understand how they can predict how many streams a song will generate, and even guarantee a minimum stream count.
Estimated streams assumes a chain of events:
A. The curator likes and accepts your song
B. The playlist has sufficient reach
C. The song is placed high enough in the playlist to receive streams.
YouGrow Promo’s cost-per-estimated-streams basis is inherently flawed because estimated stream ranges don’t account for real-world campaign variables. Factors like song genre, track quality, playlist quality, playlist positioning, and organic repeat-listen ratios vary wildly from track to track, making pre-set stream estimations a unreliable benchmark for true campaign ROI.
Let’s say their estimations are accurate.
To see what you’re really paying for, here is the break down on the costs per 1,000 estimated streams.
| Tier | Price | Expected streams | Cost per 1,000 streams |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $103 | 2K–6K | $17.17–$51.50 |
| Rising Artist | $337 | 10K–22K | $15.32–$33.70 |
| Superstar | $812 | 30K–50K | $16.24–$27.07 |
| Megastar | $1,424 | 65K–100K | $14.24–$21.91 |
| Icon | $2,011 | 105K–140K | $14.36–$19.15 |
If I were you, I would avoid YouGrow Promo. A Facebook ad campaign will deliver better results.
🥶 PLAYLIST PUSH
Already I’m annoyed with Playlist Push’s minimum camaign spend, which is $250.
$250 to send to 28 curators, each pitch costing you $8.92 on average.
Do we know the quality of these playlists? Nope.
They don’t even tell you the names of the curators or the playlists.
That’s right. You don’t even get to choose who you’re pitching to.
I dont know about you, but I want to have some control over who I’m spending my money with.
This gives me no confidence in this service, and therefor I am abandoning this campaign.
🥶 BOOST COLLECTIVE
Like YouGrow Promo, Boost Collective‘s business model also provides estimated streams on their packages.
I’m hesitant with this model for the same reason I was with You Grow Promo. You simply cannot estimate streams. There’s way too many variables at play.
It just doesnt make sense, which leads me to beleive that any playlist service that provides estimated streams is using bots.
They are also over priced for the number of playlists you are able to pitch to, and how many estimated streams you will get in return for your dollar.
| Tier | Price | Expected streams | Cost per 1,000 streams |
| Bronze | $59 | 500–1.5K | $39.33–$118.00 |
| Gold | $96 | 2K–5K | $19.20–$48.00 |
| Pro | $144 | 3K–10K | $14.40–$48.00 |
| Platinum | $222 | 8K–15K | $14.80–$27.75 |
Boost Collective also does not allow you to select the curators you want to pitch to. Upon creating the campaign, they didn’t even allow me to select a genre, which is very concerning.
My advice is to avoid Boost Collective.
🥶 SoundCampaign
I tried SoundCampaign’s playlist pitching service for my song “sad boy”.
I was able to select my targeted melodic rap, emo
Their dashboard has a slider control which selects your budget. This then determines how many blogs they submit your song to. This then shows the total amount of combined followers those playlists have.
In my case, I set a budget of $95.
This allowed me to submit to just 7 playlists. That means im spending $13.50 to pitch to each playlist.
That $13.50 each playlist just for a chance to accepted. Not great.
But, if these 7 playlists are high authority playlists, and have a ton of followers, perhaps it’s worth it.
Lets look at the total playlist followers.
Well, the dashboard says those 7 playlists have a combined follower count of 24,873, which means each playlist has an average of 3,553 followers.
This tells us the playlist are not high profile playlists.
So, right now I already know I am significantly overpaying.
I continued the campaign for the sake of showing you the results.
So lets talk about the results.
I was pitched to 7 random playlists not of my choice.
I spent $93.50 and received 2 placements.
That means $67.50 of my money was spent on rejections.
The two playlists that accepted me each had around 2,500 saves (followers).
I admit it was generous for Membrives to add my song in the #2 spot on their Melodic Rap playlist.
But, lets be generous and assume 75% of their followers (1,901 users) actually visit the playlist and play my song.
This means it cost me approximately $7.10 for every 1,000 people who streamed my song.
A more realistic cost analysis would be to factor in the money I also spent in playlist rejections. Add that $67.50, and I’m now around $24 per every 1,000 people reached.
Again, I would have had better ROI by running a Facebook ad to generate streams instead of using this service.
🥶 SUBMITHUB
SubmitHub houses thousands of blogs, playlists, YouTube channels, and influencers. The dashboard is easy to use, and creating a campaign takes less than five minutes.
On the Promote A Song page, they offer easy mode, or advanced mode.
Do not use easy mode. This option does not allow you to hand select your curators.
Instead, select Advanced mode.
Next, Upload the Spotify link of your song.
Premium vs Standard Credits
When it comes to selecting what type of credit you want to use, select premium.
Premium credits are paid credits.
Standard credits are free, but you only get 2 free credits every 4 hours. Curators are also informed that the submission is used with free credits, and they’re less inclined to accept your submission.
Next select your genres and moods.
Good curators are protective of their playlists and will only approve songs they truly believe are a good fit. So make sure you are pitching only to playlists that are genuinely a strong match for your sound.
If you’re not sure of your subgenres, SubmitHub has a tool to help identify your genres.
On the lift side of the dashboard, you’ll select your curator type (Spotify, Youtube, etc.), and approval rate.
Curators with a high approval rate indicate low quality playlists.
There are tons of bad songs that get pitched to curators every day. In my opinion, playlists who have an approval rate of any more than 40% are just accepting artists to earn commission, and they’re not focused on creating a high value experience for the listener.
I’ve done several SubmitHub campaigns over the years, and on average from my last five campaigns, my average acceptance rate was 28.4%.
Based on this information, I feel comfortable targeting an acceptance rate between 24% and 39%.
This range keeps out the curators who will accept everything (low quality playlists), but also prevents me from being rejected by extremely picky curators.
Pricing:
Expect to pay one-to-four credits per submission ($1–$5). The higher quality the playlist, the more expensive it is to pitch to them.
Below pricing, are sliders to filter curators by genre match, quality, and engagement.
I want my sliders to be in the 7-10 range, however, as I begin to customize your filter settings, I notice the number of curators begins to shrink significantly.
After customizing my options, with left me with 3 curators to chose from.
I had to loosen up my preferences a bit in order to see more available curators.
Now select the curators you want to pitch to. Review their average listeners, and approval percentage.
Read each curators short quote under their profile name. This can tell you what type of music they’re looking for, so you don’t waste your money pitching to a curator with mismatched interests.
I gotta say, I am not impressed with the average listeners numbers of these blogs. Jells Music, for example, will cost me 5 credits to pitch to, and they only have 150-250 average listeners.
Ok, I’ve got my best 20 curators selected, and it’s going to cost me $71.
Payment and Credits:
The cool thing about SubmitHub is they offer discounts depending on the amount of credits you buy, which can save you up to 25% in discounts.
Credits can go fast, so I suggest buying the 100 or 500 credit bundle. Credits never expire, so any unused credits will roll into your next release.
I purchased 500 credits last year, and had enough credits leftover to run this campaign.
Results
Total curators pitched to: 20
Denied: 18
Accepted: 2
Acceptance rate: 10%
Playlist 1: 1,651 saves, Position: 31
Playlist 2: 1,924 saves, Position: 288
Both playlists I was added to are low quality playlists, and added my song at low quality positions.
Since I purchased the credits at a 22% discount, my 66 credits were valued at about $51.50. (They refund 5 credits from a curator who did not respond.)
If we divide $51.50 amongst my own estimation of streams from the two playlists I was accepted into, I am paying over $20 per-thousand streams.
Based on these results, this campaign was a failure.
Again, I would have been better off running a Facebook ad campaign. But perhaps you may have better results.
Create a SubmitHub campaign to receive 10% off
🥶 MUSOSOUP
MusoSoup is similar to SubmitHub, but works a bit differently — instead of spending credits to pitch, you publish your project on their platform which becomes visible to all curators.
Interested curators then respond to your campaign with an offer of coverage. Each offer they send you explains their promotion strategy and price. You can then either accept or decline.
What I don’t like about their campaign creation process is that an artist bio and press release is mandatory.
A press release is necessary for blogs, but if someone just wants playlisting, this involves more work than needed.
I went through their ChatGPT-powered press release generator tool. After submitting all the info into each prompt, it said it didn’t have enough information to generate a press release.
Waste of time.
Just go to ChatGPT directly and provide a few important details about you and the song, then ask it to generate a press release.
A few days after submitting my campaign, revisit the dashboard to see if I have any messages from curators.
I notice the campaign isn’t even running. There’s note on my campaign saying I owe £42.
MusoSoup wants me to pay £42 just to publish my project on the platform. (This is not a pitching fee)
I understand the website needs to make money too, but an admin fee of £42 per song is insanity.
Seeing as I have other options without entry fees, I’m going to abandon this campaign.
If you’re still interested in testing out MusoSoup, use the discount code “MusoNotMiso” to save £6.00 on your first MusoSoup campaign.
🔥 DAILY PLAYLISTS
Daily Playlists lets you submit your song to ten playlists per week for free, with access to a marketplace of over 18,000+ playlists.
If you want to submit more than ten a week, it’ll cost you.
I had always just gone with their free submissions over the years, which has resulted in 54 rejections out of 64 submissions, (10 approved) which is a 15.7% acceptance rate.
I can’t complain there, especially when those placements were completely free.
I was curious how well I would do with a paid campaign, so I created one.
Daily Playlist’s premium credits are $2 each.
Each playlist pitch will cost you 1-3 credits depending on the curator’s tier.
I noticed when selecting more than one genre, the results only showed three available playlists for me to choose from.
Then, when I unchecked my options so that I only had one genre chosen, several other playlists became available.
This determined that checking more than one genre narrows down the results, showing only curators associated with ALL the genres you have selected.
For example, if you’re shopping for a car on Ebay and you select details like:
Year: 2015
Brand: Chevy
Color: Blue
Results only show you vehicles that are the year 2015, the color blue, and chevy models.
Those filter operations make sense when shopping for a car, but not when you’re trying to see all the playlists similar to your related genres.
If I want to submit to curators from all three genres, I have to select one genre individually, select those curators, unselect that genre, select the second genre, pick curators from that list, and so on.
Not a great user experience.
Another issue I’m noticing is that the curators’ messages under their names are often not related to the genre they’re associated with.
For example, this playlist is saying they’re looking for Country music, but their genre says Bedroom Pop.
This is confusing as an artist.
Another issue I’m having is when selecting the curators you want to pitch to, it does not tell you their social media or playlist metrics on their profile tile.
You must click each tile, which then expands their profile, which then reveals their platform stats.
This is inefficient for the artist. I want to know at a glance what curators have high playlist followers, so that I can go down the list and quickly pick who I want.
Ok I’ve selected 13 playlists and I’m ready to check out.
The total is 20 credits which will cost me $39.99.
At an average of $3 per submission, I’m happy with that price.
Premium credits guarantee a response from the curators. They also have a 7 day money back guarantee if you don’t hear from the creator.
Results:
Rejections: 10 times
Playlist adds: 3
Acceptance rate: 18.75%
Average saves between all playlists: 4,448.
On these three playlists, my song was added in 7th, 13th, and 303rd position, so my average playlist position dropped to 107th. It’s kind of tough to consider averages when you’ve only got 3 playlists to go off of. Obviously the 303rd position really affected my averages, so maybe the other two will provide some decent streams.
Ultimately, I’m happy with the pitching price, and the playlist quality for the price. In hindsight, I should have selected a few higher value playlists to increase my chances of acceptance and higher streaming opportunity.
I would recommend a friend to try Daily Playlists for their release.
Create a campaign with Daily Playlists
🔥 GROOVER
Groover is another option that offers a similar service, with 1300+ active bloggers, playlisters, radio hosts, label owners accepting submissions. You can also pitch to YouTube channels, Twitch Channels, and DJs, which is a huge benefit.
As I go through the set up process, the pages appear cleaner and more simplified than both MusoSoup and SubmitHub’s dashboard. It almost feels like a Google Form.
Similar to Daily Playlists, Groover doesn’t conveniently show the curator’s playlist followers stats on their profile tile. You have to click on the curators tile to view this information.
Pricing
Groover goes by a credit system of what they call Grooviz. (Each Grooviz coin is worth $1.15 ea)
You can buy coins individually at regular price as you need them, or purchase discounted packs.
Curators are priced anywhere from $2-$4, with many high value curators listed at the $2-$4 mark.
That’s a good sign.
However, there is no way to sort currators by price, which is also kind of annoying.
Ok, I have 34 curators selected, (all of my selected curators are $2 each) which equals $70.
I like the price.
Let’s talk results:
22 rejections
8 playlist adds
26.5% acceptance rate
Here are the saves and positions the song was placed:
Playlist 1: 30,551 saves, #37 position
Playlist 2: 8,456 saves, #28th position
Playlist 3: 12,762 saves, #99 position
Playlist 4: 6,286 saves, #15 position
Playlist 5: 2,145 saves, #47 position
Playlist 6: 7,421 saves, #20 position
Playlist 7: 2,148 saves, #174 position
Playlist 8: 6721 saves, #19 position
10,811 average saves per playlist. The position isn’t too great on most of these, so I don’t know if it will result in many streams, but these are by far the highest quality playlists I’ve seen out of all the playlisting services.
This is also the best acceptance rate out of all the playlisting services I tried.
As far as acceptance rate, playlist quality, and price, the winner for best playlisting service goes to Groover.
Receive 10% your Groover campaign today
Conclusion
Keep in mind one campaign is the same. Results depend widely on the quality of your track, the songwriting, melodies, curator tastes, and relevant genre match.
At the end of the day, no playlist pitching service can guarantee viral success, and using estimated stream ranges as a primary metric can be misleading given the countless variables. The real value of organic pitching isn’t just hitting a temporary stream target, but using third-party playlists as a catalyst to trigger Spotify’s algorithmic support like Discover Weekly and Release Radar.
Instead of shopping strictly for the lowest cost-per-stream estimate, focus on platforms with vetted curators, transparent placement data, and campaign tiers that match your release budget. Invest strategically, monitor your Spotify for Artists analytics closely, and treat playlist pitching as one piece of a broader, long-term artist growth strategy.
