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In my quest for effective music promotion, I decided to test Groover as a promising alternative to Submithub for my band's new release, "Hello." With limited resources and high hopes, I embarked on this journey to see how Groover performs for independent musicians.
By Chris RoditisMusicngear Lead Editor
In all my music promotion efforts so far, I have been using Submithub to get music blog coverage. However, almost all of my recent campaigns despite getting coverage, always left something to be desired with regards to the quality of the coverage. I had been stumbling upon discussions between music pros mentioning Grooveras a worthwhile alternative so I was very eager to give it a try for my own band's new release, "Hello".
With "Hello" coming up in two weeks, I logged into Groover to set up a campaign. I was greeted with a cheerful graphic popup informing me I will have better chances if I send to more than 50 or 100 curators. Makes perfect sense but since I am here to test how Groover performs with a very small budget - acommon scenario for independent musicians -I will take my chances with half the credits I have available (100 Grooviz - courtesy of Dorian from Groover) and keep the other half for a Part 2 later this year.
First Step - Song Upload
First impressions, an appealing user interface with clear calls to action, bright welcoming colors, and friendly language. There was a lot of information to fully digest everything and it takes some extra effort to scan it all but I feel more welcomed here, to be honest. I also found it cool to see Ad campaigns, Current Events, and Success stories,I am keeping a note to explore these features at the back of my mind, however, we are here to test blog submissions so let's get on with it!
I had already set up my band profile, MOBVIBE, and after a quick dive in the help section, I went ahead and pressed the Start a Campaign button.
MOBVIBE's songs were retrieved from Spotify, so that is a time saver if you want to promote an already released track. Hello was unreleased so I chose Add a new track and as expected, I had to fill-in the standard information about the song, the release date, lyrics etc.
I hit the first stumbling block when I saw there was no option to upload an mp3, but it doesn't really matter since Soundcloud private links are the de facto way to share an unreleased track, so I went ahead and uploaded "Hello" to Soundcloud. I found it interesting that there is a link to EP/LP, which is what I really want to do after all, promote the entire EP that includes Hello, so I uploaded all tracks to Soundcloud.
I pressed the button to move on to the next step, Select Curators and Pros, feeling quite excited as to what new and exciting outlets I would see before me, after having spent so many years getting my emotions hammered on Submithubthat I have memorized most of the outlets there.
Curator Search
To my surprise I was greeted with a "2610 curators & pros available on Groover", which is quite a large number to choose from so I went ahead and started messing with the filters, Genres, Curator/Pro Types, Countries and Advanced.
Based on the music genres I had previously entered in my band's profile, the Genre filter preselected some curators in the indie pop, indie rock, and pop-rock genres, albeit quite a few. The genre selection interface is straightforward and easy, showing a list of representative artists below each genre. I had thus narrowed down my selection to 1511 curators, so it was time to move to the next filter, Curator/Pro types.
I was in for a surprise when I saw the available options. As an indie band that hasn't toured, we have always had the prospect of a booking agent or a sync supervisor at the back of our minds. The types of curators hence were very extensive, providing me with plenty of coverage but also collaboration opportunities. This reinforced my belief that Groover can address a broader spectrum of an artist's needs beyond just promotion. Again each curator type was laid out in a clean interface with a brief explanatory description.
For "Hello", I limited my selections to Media Outlets and Journalists, which brought the number down to 511 curators. Moving on to the next filter, Countries, I left this open to all countries since we are open to all coverage at this point.
The Advanced filter provided for some interesting options, namely Top Curator/Pro, similar to Submithub's Really Good Bloggers, in exchange for 4 Grooviz. My thoughts on this are mixed as it alludes to the rest of the curators not being of a good enough level as the Top ones, which creates the question, why are they in the platform in the first place if they're not good enough?
The next option sounds promising. "Very impactful" is exactly what someone looking for coverage wants to get out of this whole deal. The description reads "Known for having a strong visibility impact on the artists shared or met", which is perfect so I checked it. I have not submitted to Spotify playlists and YouTube channels so the Certified option does not apply to my needs right now.
I reserved the final two options, High opportunity rate (Gives opportunities to more than 15% of the received tracks) and High-quality feedback (Stands out by pertinence and quality of the feedback given) for another campaign as right now I have no reference as to the approval ratio or the feedback so I'd like to see the baseline first.
With these options selected, I narrowed the list down to 44 curators, a very manageable number, and so Istarted my visual search. For each outlet, you can see the basic information that should be enough to decide if you want to delve deeperor move along. I realized that there is no indication in the teaser viewwhether the outlet accepts unreleased tracks (marked as only giving opportunities to already-released tracks) so I had to manually open a new browser tab for each curator that looked interesting. While I would have preferred something like a popup window, still this is not a deal breaker as I can keep the tabs that interest me open. What I also wish for would be the ability to sort by specific aspects eg followers, ratings, or opportunity rate, but then again if you've applied your filters well it's not such a big hassleto go through a list of 40-50 outlets.
Curator selection
Going through the final list of outlets was fun, and the detailed information for each outlet was very helpful, with an affirmative green box "They're looking for artists like you" that reaffirms that your selection is a good match, a "Good to know" box with the most important highlights and sometimes a note from Groover, and another box with the outlet'ssummarized activity on Groover.
Since Groover is a French company, it is natural to find quite a lot of outlets from France and other smaller European countries, which is something that sets Groover apart from competitors where the scale tips towards US-based outlets. It all depends on the goals the artisthasbut for a european band like MOBVIBE, coverage in Europe is our primary objective.
Right off the bat, I skipped any outlets with an opportunity rate lower than 5% as that would greatly diminish my chances and Groovies! Based on my past experience I also didn't opt in for any internet radios as their scope is usually rather limited and the coverage leaves no traces that could serve as social proof for the artist to showcase. I ended up with a balanced list of international blogs, small labels, and magazine journalists, totaling 16 curators.
Artist Bio
Before I hit the next button I figured it was time to fix my artist profile. I updated the header image, added a couple more genres through the easy-to-use genre selection list, added a bio and social links, and then I stumbled onto something interesting: write a bio in French. Luckily I had studied French in school for 9 years so I just needed to do some dusting off.
Add a Pitch
Back to the submission process and my 15 carefully selected curators, I finally hit the Next Step button (at this point it's worth mentioning I went through the above steps with significant delays in between, all in all, a week from point A to point B, and the relief here is Groover never deleted my temporary list which would surely be a huge frustration).
I was greeted with the Add a Pitch screen, asking me to "Describe your project and what opportunities you hope to obtain with this campaign". This is always a hit-or-miss situation, never sure what to write exactly since there is no recipe to increase your chances of securing coverage. My thought is always to keep it simple and easy for the curator to skim through and avoid any marketing tricks like all caps, grossly inflated advertising budgets, or flat promises to share to yourentire social following. I wrote a general message and then made a more personalized one for the Journalists (luckily didn't hit any character limits if any) and hit "Next Step" where I reviewed the campaign and my curator selection, hit sent, and voila, Campaign sent!
Conclusion
And I made it! I might have been through a similar process many times before, but it always leaves you with a sweet taste of hopeful expectation, regardless of the usually harsh reality of the outcome. To be honest, whether your music eventually gets coverage or not, or whether this coverage is of any actual value, it has less to do with Groover, and more with the current state of the blogosphere and the music industry in general, which warrants an entirely different article altogether.
All I can say is Groover did its job well. Thecombination of vibrant designand user-friendlyinterface made for a fun experience, while its unique roster of curators, journalists and collab opportunities make for a very useful tool that every DIY musician or music promoter must have in their arsenal.
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
About Music Marketing
In this section of the blog you can find agrowing array of resources and articles about music marketing, publicity tips and music business tricks.
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