Music, the media, and you

As music writers, we here at Jam Addict receive a lot of submission and review requests. 

Musicians, particularly those who are just starting their journey to become professionals, are constantly looking for opportunities to be covered in music blogs. 

And here’s the big problem –  it can be tough to score your first few interviews or album/mixtape reviews. 

And honestly, even if you are somewhat established as a musician, unless you have celebrity status, people will pass on writing about you in favor of covering less music-focused, recognizable *ahem* “personalities.”

Submission headaches

While we want to help as many up and comers in the music industry as we can, try waking up to 300+ submissions in your inbox every Monday and let me know if you manage to not feel overwhelmed.

Of course, with only 2 editors on staff, a lot of submissions went unreplied to.

If you’re one of the many musicians who hasn’t received a response from us over the years, please forgive us.

Know that we try to listen to all the submissions we get, and even if we loved every single one of them, we simply wouldn’t have the resources to write about them all.

In the past, we tried using services like Submithub to help us find artists to feature, but the results weren’t great.

A lot of the artists we were receiving submissions from weren’t a good fit, so we were right back in the same boat of rejecting most of the people who approached us.

Promo Panda review from a music blog’s perspective

In June 2020, we were approached by someone with digital PR firm Promo Panda. 

Basically, Promo Panda is a AI-powered digital publicity firm that does two things:

1. It helps people find opportunities to be interviewed or written about 
2. It helps blogs and other media outlets find relevant talent to include in their articles.

In June, Jam Addict was invited to participate in the closed beta of  Promo Panda’s blogging platform. Thus far, the results have been great.

Some of our most widely-read articles have come by way of Promo Panda, and they’ve helped us learn about some amazing artists that we may not have discovered without their help. 

We put together this review of Promo Panda to share our experience with it and to give our fellow music bloggers an idea of whether or not it could work for them.

Note that this review is going to focus on our experience with Promo Panda from a music blogger’s perspective, not a musician’s perspective. 

While we’ve heard great things from musicians who have used Promo Panda to great effect (and some have said that they think it can replace the pricey services of publicists almost entirely), we feel more comfortable doing a review from the experience we do have. 

Plus, Promo Panda’s platform for regular users looking for media coverage is already in an open beta, so feel free to try it out.

So let’s jump right in. 

First, the good

From our perspective as blog editors, Promo Panda is a massive lifesaver and does things that no other software that we’re aware of does. 

It knows what we want to write about

The most obvious gain we’ve experienced is it makes it insanely easy for us music blogs to find topics to write about and musicians to interview. 

I’m not sure of the technical specifications of what they’ve built, but the way I understand it, they use components of search engine optimization data and some basic AI to help determine exactly what content would work for Jam Addict in two ways.

Firstly, it facilitates content that we here at Jam Addict would likely cover anyway. 

Secondly, it makes sure that these article outlines will actually benefit Jam Addict through organic search traffic. 

Jam Addict gets more traffic

Secondly, it makes sure that these article outlines will actually benefit Jam Addict through organic search traffic. 

They accomplish this second part via search engine optimization data that they compile. 

This part of what Promo Panda does is pretty technical in nature, but so long as the end result is increased readership of Jam Addict, we don’t care how simple or technical it is. 

Lucky for us, the increased readership of Jam Addict is exactly what’s been happening as a result of our using it.

Boosted traffic is probably what most bloggers care about, since it can help them monetize their blog more quickly. 

For us, this was a surprising benefit. It wasn’t what we were after initially, but hey, we’ll take it!

The less good: (but not quite bad)

The only real downside we’ve experienced when using Promo Panda is that they’re very particular about how the articles we publish are written – but this mostly has to do with maintaining a certain level of quality as far as the content and its grammar. 

It makes sense – after all, Promo Panda has professionals that pay for the privilege of being sorted by its platform into blogs like ours. 

If the articles and interviews we published that includes its users were written at a 3rd grade level and riddled with typos, that starts to sound like not such a great investment.

It would be cool if somehow Promo Panda could feed us article outlines, quotes, excerpts, etc. so we could make totally custom content without any oversight on their end. 

But they have obligations they have to meet for their users, and given the reasonable price we have to pay for the service (less than a couple hundred dollars after an insider discount PP’s CEO was nice enough to send our way), it’s hard to be mad. 

Considering too that if our content strayed too far from their suggestions we’d lose out on all those SEO benefits, we’re happy accommodating their requirements for the content we publish. 

After all, it’s nearly all stuff we’d probably publish anyway, so there’s no real harm in an app like this helping us out. 

Conclusion? You should probably start using it

To all our fellow bloggers out there – if you’re tired of sifting through endless submissions from up and coming artists and want a more efficient way of handling interview/review requests, stop what you’re doing and reach out to Promo Panda to see if you can get in on their closed beta.

We have a feeling it’s going to be a game changer in both public relations and media industries. It’s certainly helped us out and reduced the daily headaches endemic to being a music blogger – what more could you ask for!