Great to see this! P&P is one of the OG music blogs.
For context, I started music blogging in 2007 (my site is still around - Indie Shuffle - indieshuffle.com). I also started SubmitHub (submithub.com).
About this: "we’re not sure what a music website’s role is in 2026 and beyond".
I waffle between cynicism and optimism. Music blogs used to be major influencers. The rise of social media and streaming platforms squashed a lot of that, and our audiences have dwindled.
Meanwhile Spotify is increasingly pushing toward AI recommendations rather than human curation. I've heard rumor that their editorial team has been halved.
So, where do music blogs fit in? Will there be a resurgence in their audience? The cynic in me says "no". In general, blogs have gone out fashion, and users don't seem to have the patience to listen through a mountain of unknown music.
But there are still those diehard music lovers who do sift through the hundreds of thousands of daily new songs. And there needs to be a human touch to curation somewhere along the line - a space that blogs still fill.
I suppose at the end of the day I'm mostly just blogging for me. For the artists I share, there's some minor exposure - as well as SEO and AI ingestion. I don't think I can make or break an artist anymore - not like we used to back in 2010. But my blog is an extension of me, and I hope that for Jacob there's some similar upside.
I think about this all the time through the lens of "authority" on a topic. When we yielded our gathering spaces online to major social sites (read, Zuck et al) we then gave the content all the authority of what it means to dialogue in those places. Which is to say... not much.
This has impacted journalism, music, science, and so much more. It would take an eternity to hash out my perspective but I think that there's value in realizing that. And I think there's value of creating content from the authority of a personal website with cache. I think music is a great place for this to take off, since you don't need institutional backing. You just need good words and a deep connection to the community. In that way, I hope people do write and create good content through their own mediums/sites. And I hope we all join in reading and sharing those sites.
Thank you for creating/maintaining indieshuffle! I visited 12-15 years ago with very fond memories. Your site was one of the few I checked on rotation due to good curation. Thank you for the human hand you played in music discovery! Visiting the site again today and “it feels very similar to how it was back then”. Thank you for sharing such extension of yourself!
I’m not a musician, but I have referred several friends to SH! You’ve helped them a ton, thanks!
Re the roll of blogs, I’m guessing that to an extent at least Spotify and other recommendation algorithms/bots are taking into account the buzz online and what bloggers are saying?
I've been working on an AI detector for the last few months. Updated it to handle Suno V5 on Wednesday - looks like it's very similar to V4.5. Am curious to see how this Studio version impacts the model I've trained.
After login it's free. But my site has been targeted by a lot of spam/abuse over the last decade, and login is something I've needed to set up to avoid that :(
I make my living off these platforms (primarily the second). So in essence, my discovery-centric services are viable products. That said, I'm not sure that's 100% what he was after in the Twitter thread this article was based on: https://twitter.com/jherskowitz/status/1466078600822677513
I’m a musician and Indie Shuffle was my first “break.”
It gave about 20,000 plays which BLEW MY MIND at the time. Nothing like waking up to a huge increase
Today I’m a modest success. Several songs have 1-2m plays on Spotify and I make $800 / month from streaming. It’s just something I do in my evenings for fun.
I owe my success to outlets Indie Shuffle and SubmitHub—- I’ve found Spotify really privileges discovery for major label artists.
I appreciate the counter-take — it seems like almost every take I read on the modern music business is coming from people who don't actually know what the reality on the ground is.
And gd submithub is awesome, I have been sucked right in, making submissions, buying credits, rating songs. It's taken up my whole morning, well done!
Sounds like a perfectly fine mismatch between proper bootstrapping and the mindset of growing investment fueled by some hypothetical value proposition.
Is submithub what I think I am seeing? Basically a solution to a spam problem by offering a channel that requires the equivalent of stamps so that senders rate-limit themselves, focusing a bit more on quality over quantity? If that's not a complete misperception I like it very much, great niche-spotting!
What I thought "Discovery" was is finding new music given some other music preferences - like Spotify's curated playlists or Song Radios. Submithub doesn't fit that to me - it's more like a social network (and I guess you make your money the same way, via advertising).
As someone who pulled this off, it was less about discovery and more about being part of it already. The problems are much easier to understand and address when they're actually problems you're facing yourself.
Mine isn't anywhere near paying the bill yet, but it's at 60+ customers for $20/year.
It's exactly as you described. I had a pain point which was trivial for most, but not for me. No existing solutions solved it properly so I decided to make it myself.
While searching for a solution, I found that a lot of other people had the same problem. It was bad enough for them that they took time out of their day to write their complaints online.
In solving my own problem, I was creating something that other people might've pay for. And they did!
I quickly learned that marketing was the most important part of the process.
Hey, two quick suggestions, mostly related to the actual beatoftheday.org website:
1) Put some info on your homepage about what this actually does. When I first landed I wasn't sure what the purpose of the website was.
2) Resize your images! For example your header logo is massive and took a good 5+ seconds to download. You have a max-width of 994px, but the image itself is a whopping 14,976px wide!
Some info would go a long way. I'm still not sure what kind of collaboration you are referring to. Are we talking collecting mp3 files? Curating playlists? Or creating music?
There's a link tucked away in the upper right (on desktop) labeled "Info" that explains the site. I agree with you though that at least a sentence or two on the main page would be smart.
I'd like to be able to sort by 'liked' and by 'baked'. If I'm looking for a new track to collaborate on I want to see the ones with the fewest 'baked' ratings.
Also, I'd love for there to be a way to see the full lineage of a given track. Perhaps even be able to fork it if, e.g., I liked what contributors 1, 2 and 3 did, but not #4, I could work off of #3's rendition.
SubmitHub is not paying to get added to playlists. It's paying to guarantee that your song is considered by the playlister - with no promises that it's actually shared. If they do decide to share it, no additional money is required.
You're basically saying: "Hey, if you give me 3 minutes of your time to listen to my song and let me know what you think I'll give you $1."
For reference, roughly 1 in 5 submissions end up getting shared. So if you send to 100 playlisters, 80 of them will say "thanks but no thanks" and roughly 20 of them will add it to their playlist for no additional cost.
Hey, SubmitHub founder here. Sorry for the confusion. You get two types of credits: standard (the 2 you saw) and premium (which you have to buy). Your standard credits refresh every 4 hours (assuming you use them).
When going through the submission process you'll see it prompts you whether you want to use your standard (free) credits or premium credits. If you don't have any premium ones -- and don't want to buy them -- make sure you stick to the 'standard' path.
The core idea behind SubmitHub's "model" is that for decades it's been near-impossible to catch the attention of bloggers/playlisters/curators/whatever. Our system dangles a carrot (~$1) in front of them to guarantee a response+feedback about your song (with the ideal outcome of course being that they share your song - no additional costs involved).
And I appreciate you are matching musicians with audiences, super valuable service. This particular credits ambiguity registered as a pretty grey pattern. My expectation was just say "$10 to put this in front of an audience of x," or "share a song with our network and then buy premium features," instead of breadcrumbing the incremental commitment screens before the hard upsell to complete it. I'm sure your mixpanel or other metrics show your abandoned carts data and if this pattern is working, it's working.
For pro musicians who are committed to your product as a promotion path, perhaps they don't care about that credits ambiguity because they go in with a marketing budget and know what they're going in for. For me, I will stick with making music for fun. I wish your team success at their mission.
Hey, SubmitHub founder here. Top tip is to do a bit of research before jumping into it - it will dramatically improve what you get out of it. Here's a really good recent podcast by an artist who managed a 68% approval rate: https://pod.co/bandhive/submithub-success-strategies-steve-m...
I'm wondering if this is also be applicable in the case of a closed combustion wood burning fireplace? (internally, at least). My understanding is that they create quite a tight seal when all closed up.
> Wood burners cause less indoor pollution than open fires. “But every time you open the door, you reduce the stove to an open fire and particulate matter floods into the home,” he said. The peaks take an hour or two to dissipate. “But by the time it comes down, someone opens the door again to refuel and you get spike after spike,” Chakraborty said. Some burners have filters, but these only reduce the pollution being vented outside.
So, seems like there's a lot of similarity under the hood to whatever Suno/Udio are doing.