How to Pitch Your Music by Email (and Actually Land in the Inbox)

You sent two hundred emails about your single. You got three replies, and you suspect most of the rest never reached a human at all. That is usually two separate problems wearing one coat: the pitch itself, and whether the message survived the trip to the inbox. This guide covers both. Learning how to pitch your music by email starts with one skill: writing something a curator, label or writer can act on in thirty seconds. The second half is setup, so the message lands next to their real mail instead of under a spam label.

The short version

Five things decide whether a pitch works. The rest of this guide is detail.

• A pitch is five lines, one link and one reason you chose that person. Length is not credibility.
• Different contacts want different things at different times, so a curator pitch and a label pitch should not be the same email with a swapped greeting.
• Follow up twice at most. Silence is an answer.
• Deliverability is a setup problem, not a writing problem. Without SPF, DKIM and DMARC on your own domain, good pitches still land in spam.
• Dead addresses hurt the people who would have replied, because bounces damage the reputation that carries your next send.

Each of those gets its own section below, with the templates and the setup.

Before You Hit Send: What Every Pitch Needs

Every pitch needs four things. Something to listen to, a reason you picked this person, the practical facts, and a way to answer in one line.

Send a link, never a file. A private streaming link, a Dropbox or Google Drive link, or a DISCO page all work. A 60 MB WAV attached to a cold email is the fastest way to get deleted, and on some servers it will not arrive at all. For anything unreleased, use a private link that does not expire in a week.

Give one link for the track and one for you. A pitch with six links reads like a press kit dump, and nobody opens six tabs for a stranger. The artist link can be a Spotify profile, an artist page or an EPK.

Include the facts they need to decide. Genre in the words their scene actually uses, release date, one or two reference artists. Then one real detail that belongs to this record and no other. A detail is "recorded with the vocalist from X" or "the demo has been getting played on Y's radio show", not "this track is fire".

The 5-line rule

If your pitch does not fit this shape, it is too long.

1. Their name, spelled right.
2. Why them, in one specific sentence.
3. What the track is: genre, mood, release date, one reference.
4. One link.
5. A short thank you and your name.

Keep the whole thing under 120 words. Nobody has ever replied "I wish that had been longer".

Subject Lines That Get Opened

A subject line has one job: tell a busy person what this is in under 50 characters. Artist name, track title and genre beat anything clever.

Here is what that looks like for each group. For playlist curators:

• Ana Sol, Night Drive (melodic house)
• Melodic house for Night Shift, new single
• Phonk single for your Low Beam playlist

For labels and A&R:

• Demo: Kade Rell, Low Beam (phonk)
• Techno demo for [Label], 1 track
• Demo submission, drum and bass, out Nov 14

For blogs and press:

• Premiere offer: Ana Sol, Night Drive, Nov 14
• Story idea: indie duo recording in a tram depot

And for radio shows:

• For your Friday show: Low Beam (phonk, clean version)
• New house single, radio edit attached on request

They all do the same job: name the artist, the track and the style before anything is opened. What kills an open: all caps, three exclamation marks, "Please listen", "Check out my new song", emoji strings, and fake "Re:" or "Fwd:" prefixes. The last one is not a growth hack. It is the oldest spam trick there is, and filters know it.

How to Pitch Music to Playlist Curators

There are two completely different audiences here. Spotify's own editors cannot be emailed at all. You reach them through the pitch form in Spotify for Artists, and only for an unreleased track. Send it at least seven days before release. Independent curators are people and small brands who run their own playlists, and many of them do accept email.

Before you pitch a playlist, check that it is alive. Look at whether recent additions are actually recent, whether the follower count grew in steps rather than one vertical line, and whether the curator talks about the music anywhere. If the description promises guaranteed streams or placement for a fee, close the tab. Paid placement breaks Spotify's rules. The traffic behind those playlists is what the platform is built to detect, as we covered in this breakdown of fake Spotify streams.

Pitch the playlist, not the person. Name it, say where your track would sit in it, and match the mood rather than only the genre tag.

Subject: Ana Sol, Night Drive (melodic house)

Hi [Name],

I found [Playlist Name] through [track or artist you have on it], and
Night Drive would sit well next to it: melodic house, 122 BPM, warm and
a bit melancholy. Out on [date].

Private link: [link]

Thanks for listening either way.
Ana
[one artist link]

How to Pitch Music to Record Labels

A label pitch goes to the demo inbox or to a named A&R, never to a general info@ address. If the label has a demo page with rules, follow them exactly: that page exists because they are tired of people ignoring it.

Check that they are currently signing. A label with nothing out in eight months is not waiting for your track. Listen to their last ten releases, and if yours sounds out of place, skip them. A targeted list of twenty labels beats a blast to three hundred. If you are not sure what the person on the other side actually does, our explainer on A&R is a useful primer.

Send one track. Two if the second is a genuinely different side of you. "I have forty more" is not a selling point, it reads as an unfinished catalogue.

Subject: Demo: Kade Rell, Low Beam (phonk)

Hi [Name],

I listened to [recent release on the label] and that is the lane I am
working in. Low Beam is phonk with trap drums, 140 BPM, finished and
mastered, no release date yet, so it is yours first if you want it.

Private link: [link]

I release every six to eight weeks and have been getting steady support
from [one real result, if you have one].

Thanks,
Kade
[one artist link]

How to Pitch Music to Blogs and Press

Write to a person, not to a masthead. Find the writer who covered an artist close to your sound, say which piece you read, and pitch them something they can build a post around. "Dear Editor" and "new single out now" are both instant deletes.

Press needs a story, not just audio. Two or three sentences is enough: where it was recorded, what changed in your sound, who you made it with. Attach nothing in the first email. Offer the press photo and release information, and send when asked. If you have an exclusive, say so in the subject line, because a premiere is worth far more to a small blog than another review.

Subject: Premiere offer: Ana Sol, Night Drive, Nov 14

Hi [Name],

Your piece on [artist] is why I am writing: Night Drive sits in the same
melodic house territory, built from a field recording I made in a tram
depot in Lisbon.

It is out on Nov 14 and the premiere is open if you want it.

Private link: [link]
Press photo and release info on request.

Thanks,
Ana

Radio works the same way, with three extra details. Write to the music director or the host of the show, not the station's general address. Say the BPM and key on a dance record, and offer a radio edit and a clean version. Specialist shows on community, college and online stations still break records, and they reply more often than blogs.

Follow-Ups: When and How Often

One follow-up after five to seven days, a final one seven to ten days after that, then stop. Two is plenty. In our campaigns most replies arrive after the first follow-up rather than the first email, which is the whole argument for sending it.

Reply inside the same thread, so the original pitch is right there. Keep it to two or three sentences. Bring a new reason to write: the release is out, a station added it, the video is up. A follow-up that only says "just bumping this" gives them nothing new to act on.

Subject: Re: Ana Sol, Night Drive (melodic house)

Hi [Name],

Quick update: Night Drive is out now and [station or playlist] picked it
up this week.

Same link if it is useful: [link]

No worries if it is not for you.
Ana

When someone supports you, answer within a day. A two line thank you is the cheapest relationship work in music, and it makes the next release easier to place.

Thanks for adding Night Drive, that made my week. I will send you the
next one first.

Treat a "no" the same way. A polite reply to a rejection is how a label that passed on this EP ends up asking for your next demo.

Timing: When to Send Your Pitch

Most artists pitch everyone in release week. That is too late for labels and editorial playlists, and too early for bookers. Spread it out.

Work backwards from the release date and the plan fills itself in. Tuesday to Thursday, early in the recipient's morning, is the window most people in music settle on. Treat that as working practice rather than a law, and do not let it stop you sending on a Monday. What matters more is that the release has somewhere to go afterwards. A profile that is current, a catalogue a new listener can fall into, and the algorithmic follow-through we described in this piece on how the Spotify algorithm works.

One timing rule belongs to the next section. A brand new mailbox should not send two hundred messages on its first day, however good your list is. Ten to twenty a day, every day, beats a single blast every time.

Email Deliverability for Musicians: Stay Out of Spam

You can write the best pitch of your life and still never be read, because the decision about where your email lands is made by machines before any human sees it. Those machines look at who you are sending as, how you send, and what happened the last time you sent. Here is the part of pitching that almost no music guide covers.

Use a domain email, and set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC

Send from your own domain, for example you@yourartistname.com, not a brand new free address. Every reputation system attaches your history to that domain, and it reads as a working artist rather than a throwaway account.

Then add three DNS records. SPF says which servers may send mail using your domain. DKIM adds a signature proving the message came from you and was not altered. DMARC tells receiving servers what to do when a message fails those checks, and sends you reports. All three live in your DNS settings, at your registrar or at Cloudflare. Your mail provider publishes the exact values to paste in, whether that is Google Workspace, Zoho or anyone else.

A safe DMARC record to start with looks like this, which monitors without blocking anything:

v=DMARC1; p=none; rua=mailto:dmarc@yourartistname.com

This is not optional advice. Since February 2024, Google's email sender guidelines require SPF or DKIM from every sender. Bulk senders need all three, SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Bulk means around 5,000 or more messages a day to Gmail addresses. Bulk senders must also offer one-click unsubscribe and keep their reported spam rate below 0.3%, with Google recommending you stay under 0.1%. Yahoo's sender requirements introduced the same rules on the same timeline. As an artist pitching a few dozen people a day you are not a bulk sender, so the unsubscribe and volume rules are not aimed at you. The authentication is, because an unauthenticated cold email from a new domain is exactly the profile filters are built to catch.

Warm up a new inbox

A domain with no sending history has no reputation, and no reputation is treated as suspicious. Start at ten to twenty emails a day and raise the volume over two to four weeks. Begin with people who are likely to reply, because replies are a strong positive signal.

Avoid paid warm-up services that trade fake conversations between mailboxes. They create reply patterns that look nothing like real correspondence, and the main thing they reliably produce is a bill.

Why dead lists kill your open rate

A hard bounce means the address does not exist. A few are normal. A lot of them tell every major provider that you are mailing people you do not actually know, which is the single clearest signature of a scraped list. Most email providers treat a bounce rate above roughly 2% as a warning sign and above 5% as a serious problem, so keep yours under 2% and ideally under 1%.

The damage is not limited to the bad addresses. Once your reputation drops, messages that would have reached interested curators go to spam too. Old lists also hold spam traps: abandoned addresses that providers reactivate to catch senders who never clean their data. Verifying a list matters more than how many names are on it.

Write one email at a time

Write one email to one person. Plain text or very light HTML. A real greeting with a real name, one or two links, no attachments in the first message. No tracking pixels on a cold pitch, and no link shorteners, because bit.ly style links in a first contact read as spam. Never put fifty curators in BCC. That is a mailing list wearing a disguise, and it reads like one.

Test before you send

Run this checklist once, then again whenever you change mail provider or domain.

Three free tools cover almost all of this. mail-tester.com scores a single message and names what is missing. MXToolbox looks up your SPF, DKIM and DMARC records and shows whether they resolve. Google Postmaster Tools shows how Gmail sees your domain once you send regularly.

Where to Get Contacts That Won't Bounce

Three ways to build a pitch list work in practice. They trade time against money against control, and plenty of artists use two at once.

Manual research costs nothing but time. Curator profiles and playlist descriptions, the demos page on a label site, the "write for us" page on a blog. Instagram bios, Linktree pages, the contact tab of a radio show. Expect five to fifteen minutes per contact, and some of it out of date.

Submission platforms such as SubmitHub and Groover sell you a guaranteed listen. You pay per submission, you usually get feedback, and it is quick. The limit is structural. You never see the email address, so every future pitch costs again.

Verified contact lists sit in between. Services like DemoPool sell verified playlist curator emails and record label A&R contacts sorted by genre, which removes the research weeks. You still write every pitch yourself, and the deliverability rules above still apply. A bought list sent badly bounces like a scraped one.

Whichever route you take, verify the addresses before the first send. That single step protects the reputation that carries every pitch after it.

Mistakes That Get Music Pitches Deleted

Most rejected pitches fail on one of these, not on the music. Each one is quick to fix.

• "Dear Sir or Madam", or the wrong name entirely, which is worse.
• Fifty recipients in BCC, which is a newsletter pretending to be a letter.
• A 60 MB WAV attached to a cold email.
• Five tracks in one message, so the reader has to choose for you.
• Pitching a genre the recipient has never touched.
• "Check out my music" with no context, no date and no reason.
• Following up every two days until someone blocks you.
• Buying guaranteed placements or streams, which breaks platform rules and leaves a trail that Spotify's detection systems are designed to find.
• Sending the same message to a curator, a label and a journalist, because all three can tell.

Run this list over your draft before the first send. It takes two minutes.

FAQ

These are the questions artists ask most often once they start pitching.

How long should a music pitch email be?

Under 120 words, or about five short lines. Give the recipient the name, the reason you chose them, what the track is, one link and a thank you. Anything longer gets skimmed, and skimming usually ends in the trash rather than the player.

Should I attach MP3 or WAV files to a pitch email?

No. Send a private streaming link instead, from a private streaming link, Dropbox, Google Drive or DISCO. Large attachments slow delivery, trip spam filters and often get stripped by the receiving server. Offer the file and send it only once someone asks for it.

How many times should I follow up after pitching my music?

Twice at most. Once after five to seven days, once more seven to ten days later, then move on. Reply in the same thread and bring something new each time, such as the release going live or support you picked up since the first email.

Is it OK to send the same pitch to multiple curators or labels?

The structure can repeat, but the first two lines cannot. Name the playlist, the release or the article that made you write, and the rest of the template can stay the same. What never works is one message in BCC to everyone, which is obvious to the reader and to spam filters.

Why do my music pitch emails go to spam?

Usually because of how you send, not what you wrote. The common causes are a domain without SPF, DKIM and DMARC, a new inbox sending at high volume, and bounces from an old list. Attachments, link shorteners and large BCC groups do the rest. Fix the setup first, then test a message with a spam checker.

Do I need my own domain to pitch music by email?

For a handful of emails a week, a normal personal address works. Once you are pitching regularly, a domain you control is worth it. You can authenticate it properly, and it builds a sending reputation that follows you. It also looks like an artist running a project.

Your Next Pitch, Step by Step

Five steps you can run this week:

1. Set up your domain email with SPF, DKIM and DMARC, then test one message with a spam checker.
2. Build a short list of people who already work with your genre, and verify the addresses before you send.
3. Write one pitch per group, curator, label, blog and radio, using the five line shape.
4. Send ten to twenty a day in the right window, four to six weeks out for labels and press, two to four for curators.
5. Follow up twice, thank everyone who says yes, and keep the replies for next time.

Pitching builds the relationships. If you also want the release reaching listeners while those conversations stay open, our music promotion packages run alongside it. For the rest of the campaign, start with our guide to promoting your music.

Updated October 2026.