Music Promotion

Promotion Tools I've Actually Tried: Aura, Musosoup, SubmitHub, and ThatPitch

By Mike · Published September 29, 2026

I've spent real money testing paid promotion tools on my own music over the past year, the same way I used to test gear before recommending it. This isn’t a top-ten roundup written from press releases. It’s what actually happened when I ran a campaign through each of these: what it cost, what came back, and whether I’d pay for it again. Two of the four are still running, so I’m marking those honestly instead of guessing at results I don’t have yet.

One quick disclosure up front: my Aura link below is a referral link, if you sign up through it we both get service credit. Nothing else on this page is paid or sponsored, it’s just the tools I’ve actually used.

Musosoup: curators come to you

Musosoup is a curator marketplace built around a different mechanic than most pitching services: instead of you submitting to a list of outlets, you submit your song once and curators come to you with offers, playlist adds, blog reviews, radio spins, social posts, and you accept or decline each one individually. Some offers are free, most carry a price the curator sets.

I ran one full campaign through it, 21 days end to end, and ended up accepting 25 offers for a total of £311.14. That’s coverage across reviews, playlist adds, and social shares, not a guaranteed chart move, just real curators choosing to feature the song.

The catch is that quality control is entirely on you. Musosoup’s curator pool ranges from legitimate outlets with real audiences to accounts that will take a fee and add you to a list nobody actually follows. Before I accept any offer, especially a playlist add, I check whether the playlist has real followers and gets updated. A placement on a dead or bot-farmed playlist doesn’t help, and it can get a track flagged. That’s extra work Musosoup doesn’t do for you, but it’s the difference between money well spent and money wasted.

To be clear, this isn’t the pay-to-guarantee-a-playlist-slot scam this site warns about elsewhere: curators here are reviewing your music and deciding, not selling a guaranteed placement. But the same instinct applies either way. Verify before you hand over money.

SubmitHub: pay per pitch, get an answer either way

SubmitHub is the pay-per-pitch version of the same idea. Credits, roughly $2 each, buy a submission to one curator, blog, playlist, or radio show, and the curator is expected to respond either way, so a pass still tells you something instead of leaving you guessing.

On the one song I’ve run through it so far: 33 pitches sent, 29 got a response, and 8 turned into real coverage, a 28% acceptance rate from curators actually choosing to feature the track. I’ve still got 16 premium and 2 standard credits banked for the next release.

Aura: AI-run Instagram ads (currently testing)

Aura is newer territory for me. It takes a Spotify link, has AI generate Instagram ad creative from it, and runs the Meta ad campaign targeting listeners for streaming growth, charging a percentage of ad spend rather than a flat fee.

I’m currently testing it. My first campaign just went live, a 20-day run on their Pro+ tier. I don’t have results to report yet and I’m not going to guess at numbers before I have them, I’ll come back and update this section once the campaign actually finishes.

If you want to try it yourself, this is my referral link, it gets you service credit and gets me a bit too, that’s the one paid relationship on this page.

ThatPitch: sync licensing on autopilot

ThatPitch handles sync licensing distribution, submitting a track to 100+ sync libraries at once, the catalogs music supervisors pull from for film, TV, ads, and games, instead of pitching each library one at a time. The free tier gets you into one library; the paid tier unlocks the full network plus sync briefs, open calls from supervisors looking for a specific kind of track. ThatPitch doesn’t take a cut of anything a placement earns.

I’m running my catalog through it now. Sync placements are a slow game even when they land, sometimes months out, so there’s genuinely nothing to report yet. This is a wait-and-see entry, I’ll update it the first time something actually places.

What I’d try first

If you’re deciding where to start, cost and certainty matter more than hype. SubmitHub is the lowest-risk entry, cheap per pitch and you get an answer either way. Musosoup can be worth more per dollar if you’re willing to actually vet each offer instead of accepting everything that comes in. Aura and ThatPitch are both still open questions for me, real money committed, no verdict yet, and I’d rather tell you that honestly than pretend I already know how they’ll turn out.

I’ll keep this page updated as the two running campaigns finish and real results come in, not as a launch post I never touch again.