Algorithm

This week Ari answers more of your questions! If you’d like to submit to our next round of questions, please sign up to our email list.

Releasing music today is vastly different from releasing music even just 5 years ago. It's no longer about release week. It's now about release year. There are extremely important steps to take before *and after* the release of each single and album to make sure you have the biggest effect.

Jason Grishkoff started a music blog called Indie Shuffle back in 2007, when music blogs were still cool. After a 3-year stint at Google, he was lucky to take the blog full-time in 2013. From 2014 to 2015 digital advertising in the music industry changed rapidly, and a number of bloggers found themselves looking for alternative sources of income. Many gave up to focus on their day jobs, but Jason decided to double-down on his coding abilities and created a website called SubmitHub, where musicians, labels and publicists could submit their songs to blogs like Indie Shuffle. Flash forward to 2022 and nearly 30 million submissions have been submitted through the platform. Jason still runs the operation as the only developer, and the product is constantly evolving to meet the needs of the modern music promotion industry.

Shirley Halperin is an Executive Editor at Variety, where she spearheads music coverage for the print magazine and Variety.com.

Joining us this week on the New Music Business is Kam Franklin, lead singer of the Houston-based soul band, The Suffers.

Our guest this week on the New Music Business is Dan Runcie, the founder of the podcast and research group Trapital.

Do you want to know who the most powerful gatekeeper in the music industry is right now?  No, it’s not a Spotify playlist editor. It’s not a major label A&R. It’s not even a person. It’s the TikTok algorithm.  TikTok is currently the most powerful free promotional tool that musicians have at their disposal.