Quick tip this morning about outlets who have high approval percentages.
High approval rates are almost always a red flag. There are two exceptions, though:
- The outlet only approves submissions (you’ll see a note to this effect)
- They have a low response rate.
All other scenarios are probably trouble. In this blog post, I’ve laid out what to expect from high-rate approvers and how you can navigate them successfully.
Why is having a high approval rate a bad sign?
Let’s try a little exercise. Imagine that each curator is hosting a talent show. The more people on the stage, the less likely that you’ll get noticed in the crowd. Pretty easy to see how that makes things difficult, right?
High approval percentages almost always mean songs are shared on a “stage” that is impossible for the intended audience to stay on top of.
Unfortunately, high approval rates also mean that the quality of the material shared is likely to be less. That means your song will either land in a crowded playlist, or, the corresponding blog post won’t have as much thought put into it. NB: Outlets with lower approval rates are way more selective, which means that if approved, your song gets a lot more care when being shared. NB2: Outlets with high approval rates may not count toward the popular chart.
If you’ve identified someone who looks like bad news, you can hide them from your list by clicking the button circled below.
Are there upsides to being shared by a high-approve outlet?
Possibly, yes. It’s widely believed that on Spotify, getting lots of shares signals to the algorithms that your song is one they should pay more attention to. And if you want people to find articles about your song when they search Google, approvals can also help.
Does a high approval on SubmitHub mean they’re bad news? Nope!
As mentioned in the opening paragraph, there are a select group of blogs who refund you if they don’t approve your song.
Submitting to them means that won’t find out why your song was declined, but it means that if you do get a response it’s almost always an approval.
You’ll be able to identify these outlets by looking at the “Worth knowing” section, as shown below.
The second category of “not-so-bad” outlets are those who have high approval percentages, but low response rates. Essentially, it means that they’re perusing their submissions queue and only picking songs they want to approve, ignoring (for the most part) what they’re not interested in featuring. The screenshot below shows an example.
And that concludes today’s lesson! If you’re a submitter who likes to filter blogs based on approval rates (from high to low), then this hopefully helps.
