Music Promotion

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

By Mike · Published September 29, 2026 · Updated October 24, 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. One of the four is still running, so I’m marking that one 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 Meta ads (expensive per listen)

Aura takes a Spotify link, has AI generate short video ads from it, and runs the Meta ad campaign for you, aimed at streaming growth. It charges a flat price per campaign rather than a cut of the ad spend.

I ran one 20-day campaign on their Pro+ tier. The plan was $329, and checkout added a $29 line item called a Boost Pack, for $358 in total. I could not find the Boost Pack described anywhere on their site or inside the account, so I can’t tell you what it did.

Here is what the dashboard showed when the campaign finished. All $329 of the budget was used. Aura reported 582 results at 43 cents each. Those results are clicks from the ad over to a streaming service, not listeners: 294 of them went to Spotify. Aura’s own streams panel showed 2 Spotify streams a day for the song in the 10 days before the campaign and 2.5 a day during the 21 campaign days, 52 streams in all. Give the campaign credit for every one of those streams and it works out to roughly $6 a stream. Give it credit only for the lift over the usual 2 a day, about 10 streams, and it is closer to $33 a stream. Aura doesn’t show either number, I worked them out from its figures.

Where the clicks came from matters as much as what they cost. About 56% of the results came from Indonesia, 23% from Egypt and 18% from the Philippines, and 98% of it was on Android. My read is that this is cheap attention from places far from where I play and where my audience lives, so a 43 cent click tells you very little about a listener who will stick around or buy anything.

I also stopped trusting the written summaries on the dashboard. Midway through, the insight panel named the wrong ad as the top performer, and at the end it said streams were up 23.8% while its own streams panel said 25%, so I went to the per-ad and per-stream numbers instead.

My take is that it was expensive on a per listen basis. If you want to try it anyway, 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 was expensive per listen, and the clicks it bought came from far away. ThatPitch is still an open question for me, real money committed, no verdict yet, and I’d rather tell you that honestly than pretend I already know how it will turn out.

I’ll keep this page updated as ThatPitch produces a result, not as a launch post I never touch again.