Matchfy is a music marketing platform that connects artists and playlist curators in a unique way. Instead of paying per submission, you pay one monthly fee and can submit to as many playlists as you like. On the surface it seems enticing, but there are some serious drawbacks to their approach and we’re going to talk about them in this review. In this Matchfy review we’ll cover the good and the bad…
I need to preface this review by saying originally Matchfy and I were doing sponsored content. Specifically they agreed to sponsor multiple YouTube videos, multiple newsletter blasts and multiple podcast integrations. They even offered to make me the official brand ambassador for North America. This review however is definitely not sponsored.
In fact, shortly after starting the deal with Matchfy I asked to terminate the contract, I removed all the content I created for the platform and I refunded the down-payment they gave me.
So this review is going to be 50% review, and 50% me explaining what the heck happened, because it relates very closely to my perception of the platform.
But for those of you in a rush… In my opinion Matchfy is not a good platform to promote your music. While I don’t think Matchfy is a scam, I do think that their platform has several massive design flaws that ruin the entire thing for me. Additionally some of their ‘features’ greatly concern me.
My opinion on 3rd party playlisting is already questionable, my opinion of Matchfy is lower.
How This Started
The sponsored content for Matchfy started like most sponsorship requests I get, a simple email in my inbox. I literally get dozens of requests every month and I reject or ignore 99% of them. It is quite rare for me to do sponsored videos.
Matchfy seemed like a service that would be a perfect match for my audience. They gave me a free account for a week to play around and check out the platform, I tested out several of the features and every thing looked good. We decided to go forward and partner for some content.
My first video covering the platform actually went pretty well. While it did receive more dislikes than other videos, it still had a 96% like ratio. There were some comments about the platform that were somewhat negative, but in my experience this is totally normal anytime you’re talking about a service or product – there will always be naysayers no matter how great a product is.
However the problems started to show when other comments came in claiming they could only sign up for an annual plan, or that they were denied refunds, or that they submitted to 100’s of playlists only to find they were instantly approved or rejected, or that they were added to dozens of playlists only to get zero streams after weeks of being on them.
Dead, AI Playlists
One thing that I did not notice in my testing of Matchfy was their AI matching feature. Apparently this feature came out right around the time I was testing the site, so i’m not sure if it was active or not when I used it. This seemed to be the most hated aspect by my audience.
When you sign up to Matchfy you must create an account with your Spotify account as the login. When you do this, you have to authenticate with Spotify and agree to all the actions Matchfy can take on your profile. One of these features is that they can add or remove songs to your playlists, and follow playlists on your behalf.
By default, everyone that signs up for the site opts in all of their playlists to the AI matching feature. This means that if someone sends you a song and they determine it’s a close enough fit, they’ll add it to your playlists without asking you. It also means they reject songs automatically. Additionally, anytime you submit to a playlist you will automatically follow the playlist.
My beef with this is that:
- This should be disclosed much more clearly, because nobody from my audience seemed to have any idea (myself included) that this would happen
- People end up with a bunch of inactive followers on their playlists
- People end up with awful songs on their playlists
The result of this is that the quality of these playlists is reduced, and from the artist perspective you’re basically just sending your songs to a computer algorithm that decides which crappy playlists you should be added to.
At this stage I was frustrated, because I couldn’t believe I overlooked such an annoying aspect of the platform. But I messaged my contact at Matchfy with my concerns and I was assured they would look into fixing them, which made me feel comfortable enough to move on with our partnership.
Matchfy Customer Support
The next strike out with Matchfy was when I heard that not only did they only have annual subscription accounts, but they also were denying people of refunds. This isn’t entirely unreasonable because they have a free tier people can test out the service with, however their free tier is borderline useless.
In my opinion they need some type of reasonable window or usage limit where refunds are allowed. That, or their free tier needs more functionality for people to test the platform with.
In addition to this it seems some people upgraded and weren’t able to log in. Or, the site was a buggy mess after they upgraded. Or, Matchfy never replied to their customer support requests. Apparently my audience overwhelmed their support team and they dropped the ball, which I can understanding, but it sounds like they never quite made it right with my people.
I run a business so I understand that mistakes happen. But I expect that when mistakes happen the company will eventually make things right with the customer, and I don’t think that happened here.
On a similar note lets talk about…
Matchfy VIP Campaigns
This was the final straw for me with Matchfy. Two of my clients showed me the results they got from a $400 VIP campaign, and I was shocked. In both cases:
- Neither client received any human communication from their account rep (something they paid $50 extra for)
- Both clients were added to 350+ playlists, almost overnight, after running the campaign
- Both clients received much less than 1,000 streams from all of these playlists
Matchfy’s VIP campaigns essentially are just automatically adding you to hundreds of dead playlists without the playlist owner’s knowledge. Not only is this a massive waste of money, in my opinion it’s ethically questionable.
Overall you’d be much better off using something like SubmitHub, or even bulk 3rd party playlisting. Ideally you’d just run ad campaigns – learn how to do that yourself here or hire my agency to do it for you.
Disclaimer
I just want to point out that everything in this article is my opinion, my experience, and my story. While I stand behind my words my intention is not to attack Matchfy. The purpose of this post is to share my feedback on the platform so that other people can decide if they want to try it themselves.
Matchfy, if you read this and decide to fix any of these problems on your platform please let me know. I’m willing to give services a second chance if they can show improvement.
