October 28, 2024
For 23 years, I've been supporting independent musicians in promoting their music. For the past 3 years, I’ve been offering private consultations to help them refine their promotional strategies (link in bio). Because I'm also here to help, and that's what I'm going to do again with this post.
And often during consultations, the same advice comes up: be authentic!
Today, you’ll get a behind-the-scenes look at my submission dashboard. Now fully independent from music submission platforms, I have my own system in place. It took me months to build, but it works perfectly. My dashboard has a column labeled "Why it’s been declined?" that only I can see, as it contains my personal notes.
Today, I’m sharing this with you through the last 10 submissions, all received within the past 12 hours:
You’ll notice that 60% of the songs were declined without even being listened to, for the same reason: ChatGPT.
AI is now part of daily life for many people. I use it myself to simplify certain tasks. But not to write my articles. I’ve done it in the past, as a bit of a “mockery” of labels who sent me bios and song descriptions generated by ChatGPT through submission platforms. It was my way of saying, “Here’s what I can write with your AI content,” with, I admit, maybe a bit too much sarcasm.
Looking back, I see this as a huge lack of respect, and it has become unacceptable to me.
It’s absolutely inconceivable to ask someone to make a huge effort (the magazine you’re about to discover on Nov 5 is the result of 3 years of research, testing, and headaches) when you haven’t put in any effort yourself.
You can’t ask someone with 23 years of promotional experience to use their mind to write an article about your song when you haven’t even taken the time to use yours to address them. You didn’t speak to them. ChatGPT spoke to this human being. And that changes everything! Trust me, it shows! I can see it at first glance, in less than 2 seconds!
I forgot to mention this but all those submission biographies are looking exactly the same, with the same words and expressions, and that looks scary. You're already competing in an overcrowded place (120K daily releases on Spotify!) and you can't stand out if you all have the same bio and press kit written by the same person: a robot.
That was my rant. Sorry, I had to get that out.
Let’s stay human. Let’s stay connected. Let’s look out for each other, please!
Thanks for reading!
Musically yours,
Niko.
