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Music promotion scams and how to recognise them

Updated 5 October 2026 · 2 min read

The promotion industry contains genuine service providers and a large number of businesses selling something they cannot deliver. The distinction is usually visible in the language of the offer.

The five recurring patterns

Almost every scam is a variation of one of these.

  • Guaranteed placement — a paid promise of playlist, radio or blog coverage. Coverage decisions belong to the curator or editor, so the guarantee is either fake or bought against the platform’s terms.
  • Pay-to-be-featured blogs with no audience, billing you for a post nobody reads.
  • Fake A&R or label interest that ends in a fee for marketing or mastering rather than a contract.
  • Royalty advance offers that require you to sign away catalogue rights or hand over distributor access.
  • Bulk email blasts sold as promotion, which land in spam and can damage your domain.

The questions that expose them

Ask what you are buying. Legitimate providers sell a service with a defined scope: sending capacity, contact data, verification, tooling, campaign management. If the answer is a specific outcome — 50,000 streams, a guaranteed playlist, three radio plays — you are buying an outcome nobody controls.

Then ask how it will be measured, and what happens if the result does not appear. A real provider describes what their tool does and leaves the result to the market.

What legitimate promotion costs

Real costs are infrastructure and labour: mailboxes, sending, verification, contact research and upkeep, campaign tooling and reporting. That is what a monthly plan pays for. Nothing in that list requires anyone to promise you a curator’s decision.

Our position

We sell the infrastructure and the access. You pick the audience from a library of over 22,000 verified music-industry contacts, write your pitch, and send it from a managed mailbox included in every paid plan. We do not sell placements, we do not guarantee results, and we do not work with bots or purchased plays.

Frequently asked questions

Is paid playlist promotion always a scam?

Paying a curator for placement breaches the platform’s terms and is generally a red flag. Paying for tooling or for connecting with curators is a different, legitimate category.

How do I verify a promotion company?

Look for what they actually sell, whether they publish honest limitations, whether they name real infrastructure in a plan, and whether their own site appears in search for the work they claim to do.

Are paid blog features ever worth it?

Rarely. A feature in a publication with no real readership is a receipt, not coverage. Genuine outlets do not charge for editorial.

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