These days roughly 20% of the songs coming through our platform for promotion are AI-generated. Roughly 75% of them are honest and declare their AI usage - but another 25% try to hide it. Some of them are actually writing scripts to "clean" their audio so that it can bypass detection.

So, seems like there's a lot of similarity under the hood to whatever Suno/Udio are doing.

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.

If you want to test it, here's the link: https://www.submithub.com/ai-song-checker

1) https://www.indieshuffle.com - a music discovery blog

2) https://www.submithub.com - a service that connects musicians with music curators

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

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!

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.

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).

Spotify did indeed take away a lot of the "regular listeners" from music blogs, but they're not alone in the downfall of music blogs as a whole. I think a lot of that can be pegged on the way the internet has shifted in general. Music blogs lost a lot of things in that 2013-2015 era, including (but not limited to):

- A steep drop in advertising revenue (we used to charge $5+ CPM - but folks learned Google/Facebook were far more effective). This wasn't specific to the music blogging industry - pretty much all independent publishers went through this.

- Google giving 50% of their real-estate for song searches to a giant YouTube thumb. Killed SEO for music blogs overnight.

- Technology: Spotify just does music-listening tech better than any independent music blog could ever hope to.

So, in an age where Spotify is king and everyone's buzzing about TikTok, where do music blogs fit? And are they even relevant?

Heck yes they are! Thing is, music blogs are where people actually go to discover music. Spotify, on the flip side, caters toward "passive" listening experiences where they make sure you never have to think about it for yourself.

Net result is that for artists a targeted blog promotion campaign is still quite important as it can lead to valuable exposure within the industry: A&R teams at labels, Spotify editorial staff, and festival bookers (RIP) still look to music blogs to do the grunt work of sifting through the 25,000+ new songs coming out daily.

In 2015 I launched https://www.submithub.com/ to help music blogs deal with the hundreds of music submissions they were receiving daily. That platform has since taken off - recently passing its 16 millionth submission (in less than 5 years).

We allow artists to easily connect with blogs, Spotify playlisters, YouTube channels, Instagram/TikTok influencers and more -- and compensate those curators for the time they spend listening to and considering each submission. And believe it or not, one of the most-targeted outlet types on there is still the humble "blog".

I could go on for hours, but I'll leave it at that for now :)

We helped the CEO and SVPs figure out how much to pay the company's top ~100. That meant we were hands on with performance bonuses, equity packages, hiring negotiations, promotions, and more.

> I suspect successful 20% time projects are the ones where permission is not required, and don't need someone else to implement?

Part of my proposal was that they bring me on to help them run their fledgling music blog, so it wasn't so much that they needed to execute much themselves -- more that they needed to decide the music blog was worth having a dedicated employee. At the time I think they were more focused on trying to get all their licensing ducks in a row.

We helped the CEO and SVPs figure out how much to pay the company's top ~100. That meant we were hands on with performance bonuses, equity packages, hiring negotiations, promotions, and more.

The coolest part about it was getting to frequently join Laszlo Bock (head of People Ops at the time) when he met face-to-face with the CEO (first Eric, then Larry) and the SVPs to discuss all of the above. It got to the point where they all began to recognize me, which was pretty darn cool as a 20-something-year-old.

A byproduct of all that exposure was that I ended up being privy to a huge chunk of the "corporate drama" taking place in the upper ranks. It's been 7 years since I left, but as I'm sure you can understand, getting into details is probably a bit of a no-no :)

I met with a couple members of their team who were open to entertaining me given my background with a music blog. I remember being really excited about it - and I spent a lot of time preparing a deck about how exposure provided by the Google Music blog could be used as leverage to give the platform legitimacy in the eyes of independent artists (something that SoundCloud was doing really well at the time).

A few senior leaders agreed to let me pitch my ideas, and after a fair bit of head-nodding, nothing actually happened.

I ended up leaving Google about 3 months later to take my music blog full-time (still up and running at https://www.indieshuffle.com, and eventually started a much-more successful music venture called SubmitHub - https://www.submithub.com). I count myself fortunate to say I have no regrets leaving Google.

Reflecting on the idea of 20% projects, I do appreciate that my managers gave me the opportunity to explore alternate opportunities within the company, and that the Google Music team was receptive to me poking my head into their affairs. I think it holds a lot of potential when it comes to retaining top talent that's at risk of jumping ship for something different, and made me feel like I was part of the larger company rather than simply stuck in a silo.