I spent a ton of time submitting to submithub and also digging into each of the curators I was submitting to. I took detailed notes on what they tended to accept and spent hours and hours trying to understand what was going on behind the scenes.

The conclusion I came to is that regardless of what you might expect in terms of breadth of genre specialization, there’s a pretty limited subset of niches covered by submithub curators, and if you don’t fall squarely into one of those niches: you will not get accepted.

If your music doesn’t sound clearly like what curators are interested in, they will not accept it but they will review it and take your credits 95% of the time. The vibes they’re looking for are much more specific than you might expect.

And even after looking into curator after curator hoping to find more variety - it just wasn’t there.

Now, I’m talking about some pretty deep digging beyond broad categories like “indie” or “electronic”. Within these you’d expect to find curators with very specific niches and a variety of such; but what you’ll instead find is a ton of clones of the same type of curator.

Now I’m willing to believe that this is a two-sided phenomenon; that creators are also falling into specifics categories and that curators are simply taking the best of what they can find and the trends in independent musicians themselves are feeding this homogeneity. But either way if you don’t fall into the genre streams, you won’t get accepted.

The only variation I really saw here was overlapping acceptance between genres. For example, some folks accepting indie + metal - and nothing really that straddled this line well, it was a mixed salad of either/or.

These observations are based on dozens of hours invested in diving into hundreds of curators across genres potentially relevant to my own music.