If you're an artist/band and would like to know the submission process, welcome! We're going to give you some tips on this page for you to get a successful feature on IMC (and other curators).
/!\ We strongly recommend that you read this entire article so that you understand our mindset. If you're too lazy to do that, that's fine. There are tons of other blogs that may like a blindly submitted song :D
Now, let's answer some questions we're frequently asked by musicians.
What value does IMC bring?
Pretty simple: connections. The connections we create on IMC are truly unique. Whether it's between the artists and our fans, or between the artists themselves. Our fans are very supportive and they're active on multiple platforms. They buy your merch. They give you tips on Twitch. They support you on Patreon. If you're making high-quality music, they'll give you back high-quality support. We can not exactly quantify this support. We can only tell you that some artists are now making a living ;)
About the community of artists we created, we have quite a good example to show you. Thomas LaVine (North Carolina) was working on a song called "By The Coast" but he was kinda stuck, as he wanted a female voice for it to bloom. As he's been featured several times on IMC before, he came back here and started browsing our articles and came across Luna Keller (Germany). She was the female voice he was looking for. The song is here:
Without IMC, maybe this masterpiece would still be sleeping on a hard disk drive. But it's alive and got almost 260K streams.
Who else could talk about my love for independent music than some of the IMC Family artists themselves? Watch the music video below to learn more about the connections we just talked about.
Why does IMC exist?
Our goal is to select the best of the best songs for our dear readers and listeners so they don't have to go through 100K+ daily releases on Spotify or through hundreds of submissions. We prefer to do it for them so all they have to do is to enjoy the selection of the best indie music out there. We also have a unique artist directory on the site. Our readers can search for artists based on their location.
What kind of music do you feature?
We mainly focus on 3 genres: indie-folk (our favorite one), indie-pop, and indie-rock. But always with that strong emotional power that can move people. If you have that kind of track in your closet, please submit it! But don't submit old songs, our readers love to discover what's freshly released!
How many submissions do you have to deal with?
Honestly? A lot! This is why we recommend sending your song at least 4 to 6 weeks before the release so we can make sure we have some space for it. As we don't want to flood our lovely readers with too much content.
Okay, I understood the values of IMC and want to submit!
If you'd like a written review of your song, you can submit it through SubmitHub. We offer you a 10% coupon so you can buy credits cheaper. So let's say that, if you want to send your music to 10 other curators, your submission to us is free with this coupon :)
Pro tip: don't submit 2 or more songs at once to a curator. It shows you don't know which track you want to promote and that... you have no strategy. Carefully choose your songs based on the curator you are targeting.
For you to get a short SEO-optimized review that will stay forever on IMC, we need your artist profile on Submithub to have at least a bio, high-quality press pics (no black and white and no photos of your back), and your social links so we can send our readers to you. It's really essential that your artist profile is filled so that we can write "on the spot". So do yourself a favor: take your time to do it! Don't see this as a personal request from us, Jason Grishkoff, founder of SubmitHub, says it himself: filling out your artist profile is essential:
BAD EXAMPLE:
We think it will be difficult to tell your story to our readers. And also complicated to send them to you...
GOOD EXAMPLE:
Your attention please: you're not paying for coverage or guaranteed coverage. You're paying for the time it takes to listen to your song and write feedback about it. Not for placement.
I don't want to pay for my music to be heard!
That's okay! On SubmitHub, you can rate other musicians' music and earn premium credits :) Just go to the "Hot Or Not" section. It's a win-win! We tried to open free submissions, but we have to face the truth: the quality of them was really low and didn't fit our quality standards at all. We're sorry that we had to make this hard decision but going from a few thousand submissions to a few hundred has made our life much easier!
Where does the money you get from SubmitHub go?
We're not making money with this project. It's pretty simple: domain name, hosting, taxes, and software subscriptions. Once our costs are covered, the rest is converted into SubmitHub premium credits and sent to IMC Family artists for the promotion of their next release. You will join the IMC Family after 5 IMC features :)
You approved my song on SubmitHub, what happens next?
This is another blogger's secret, but I'd say it's more specific to us. If we have all the information we need on your artist profile... We'll do something that is quite normal to us but surprised the founder of SubmitHub when he saw our turnaround time. The secret is in this video and it may surprise you as well.
Got it? That's why the sooner you submit, the better it is, so you don't have to wait for weeks before our article is up, after the release date. It comes out ON the release date. And as we publish them in the morning here in Europe, if you're in the US, they're already up for a couple of hours when you wake up. This gives our articles this "hot on the spot" side. We put ourselves in the reader's shoes: they will come to IMC, click play in the review, and start reading our thoughts. And they may think "ah yeah, I agree (or disagree) with you on that point". And also, the hot reaction (in our humble opinion) is the most important one for the artist. Knowing the feelings your own song can trigger is truly important and even rewarding and helpful. We're not saying this to brag, but, as we already said earlier, if we feel an immediate connection to the song, chances are our audience, who we've known for years, will have that same connection.
So what happens if your song is already released when you submit it? Well, no worries, we don't only post on Fridays, so we'll have a spot for you during the next week or two (depending on how many songs we have to share).
And what do you expect from me?
A "thank you" is perfect :) But if you want to do something totally free that is very helpful, you can share the review over your social media accounts if you liked it. Perfect collaboration is when you have a website with a press section: please make a link to it :) You know, this tiring law of algorithms. If Google notices that loads of websites have links to us, they'll rank us better. And so we'll get more readers. And the next time you come up with a new release, you'll get more readers. We'd say that we are here to create the article about your wonderful work, and you're in charge of the promo. This is how we grow together.
Final thoughts?
If you have read this far, first of all, thank you for taking the time to do it! We hope this has helped you understand how a blogger works and revealed some "Behind The Scenes" that may be useful to you. If you feel like the values you found here are yours, go for a submission!
