Indie Music Academy Reviews 

Indie Music was great to work with! We are just getting started as an independent record label in a niche genre (Contemporary Christian Worship Music) and Ryan and the staff helped us a lot. Very responsive and got us out of the starting gate.

Our band decided to give Indie Music Academy a shot, investing in multiple playlist promotion orders with high hopes. We waited patiently, but as nearly a month passed with no results, we had no choice but to cancel our orders. The experience was frustrating—there were no proactive updates, the ordering process was disorganized, and customer service was virtually nonexistent.

this is a response to Oliver from NL ( holland )

i have had the best support from Alexx B , my emails are almost immediately answered .
and by the way Alexx is a She .
vinnie from NL. amsterdam

It's always a pleasure to work with Indie Music Academy! I receive valuable advice for my work as an independent artist and great placements on playlists with an amazing impact all over the world. Thanks for all these things!

I really enjoyed working with this company! Aimee and Alexx helped me and were both great! I loved being able to log into the tracker so I could see where my campaign was and the placements I was able to get. The campaign is going great so far! I am excited to send in more music soon!

I’ve learned a ton from IMA, and the entire staff is professional and kind! Their explanations of my data during my recent Meta ads campaign really went above and beyond. Sometimes their email responses take a bit of time, but when they do come, they are thorough. Thanks IMA, I will be back!

Terrible experience with indiemusicacademy. Alexx is the only support agent available and ignored me for 2+ weeks. When I finally got a response from his, he gaslighted me by saying I was ''spamming'' him because I followed up on the request every 2 days. I would highly discourage using indiemusicacademy as long alexx works there

You do need to be patient with this service but at the end of the day they delivered on their promise. The first 2-3 weeks I only got automated emails about other products and that was frustrating. I was hoping for updates on how my campaign was going from a real person.

Ryan the owner of the company does genuinely care about his clients and is good to his word. It’s not cheap but I would recommend Indie Music Academy to artists looking to get their music heard.

Indie Music Academy--musicians helping musicians wade through the oceans of schemes, scams, and plain bad advice. They are a trustworthy and continually evolving business, and they helped jump-start the marketing of my music.

I had a great experience. The guys at IMA are legit and good at what they do. As soon as I can I'll be coming back for more.

I am running a campaign on the Indie Music Academy. There is nothing wrong with the campaign, but the company is totally unreachable – except for the overload of automated email marketing I receive. All other 'communication' is with bots - no one replies to emails, and I am unable to login to my account. This seems like a ghost company. After receiving your arrogant reply i have changed my rating to one star. I DID attempt to communicate - very much so; but all I got was bot replies. The only channel with a response from you was on Facebook - where a bot replies - but of course with the signature of 'Ryan' - as on everything else. I too will give you the opportunity to change your reply. Or people can just judge for them selves. And no: I am not a bot.

Update: I agree - I did hear from you after 14 hours. This was the first thing I heard from you in three months. In the 3 months you delivered 1000 of my 10.000 plays. So you will be done delivering in 3 years. So ...

i submitted a house/garage song, with some unique story of production behind it. almost for a month there were no results, after i asked about the status, my track was placed on a FLASHBACK 70s/80s/90s playlist. if this is the level of curation at this business, i would strongly recommend going elsewhere.
sad, because they seemed convincing.

–––

UPD: after i reached out to them, the track was indeed placed on a different (and way more relevant) playlist. the fact that there were no additional costs to that, goes without saying to me, because the initial placement was wrong.

also they tried to reach out to me "to discuss the campaign strategy", but if that was supposed to happen, it should've happened initially when placing the order.

eventually, i see that the guys try to do their job the best way possible and do care, but not w/o hiccups.

We started using IMA’s new meta ads campaign management and WOW… the results have been beyond worth the investment. Marcelo was our campaign manager and he was incredible! He was so professional and provided a 15 minute breakdown after the first 30 days, thoroughly showing us exactly how our songs ads were doing and just being above and beyond the entire time. Very transparent service and I hope they continue to offer this as it would be something I would like to use year round. My only wish is that you could add to your ad spend month to month if desired. Still A+ service, though.

I really like these guys. I feel that they really care about the Artists and actually work hard. When I got into a cash crunch, they were very understanding and accommodating. I also got real, meaningful results.

I appreciated getting a personal email from Alexx welcoming me to Indie Music Academy. He always responded to my questions and was very helpful. The company did exactly what it said it would do. It found placement for my song and it has already garnered over 7K streams on Spotify. But the song has to carry itself, so they do their best to find a curator that is interested in your music and will add to their playlist. It's like having a publicist for Spotify. So happy to have found I.M.A.
Thank you!

Alexx hyped us up that our song would be a good fit for their playlist network. Ordered services and they could not place the song after 12 business days. Requested and received a refund. Time is money.

UPDATE:11/28/2023
Thanks for your response. We're perfectly aware of your terms. For us to wait and watch ⌚ 3 more days we figure what will those 3 days do that 12 days hadn't already. That's 3 days early that we can move that budget around. So, respectfully that we got an early refund we'll change our rating.

Great service and great results!

I would highly recommend Indie Music Academy to any indie musician needing a push in the right direction.

We had a pretty bad experience with Indie Music Academy. At first, we submitted a song called Empty Up and after a few weeks, they told us they were unable to place it in any playlists (which is no prob). They emailed us and so we asked them to try with our newer release called Blur which had just come out instead. They said they would pitch that song. More time went by and then they emailed back saying that they had successfully found curators that would accept our song -- but they had placed Empty Up instead of Blur now. This was frustrating because it was weeks after it would have been useful to have Empty Up get streams. When I asked them to place Blur they said we'd have to pay again, even though they'd agreed to switch to Blur already...

Once Empty Up started getting streams, we saw very clearly that the rate of streams would not meet the 100,000 mark within 12 weeks. I kept emailing them (I worked specifically with Alexx) showing how the current rate of streams was not going to meet the mark but they kept saying "the curator says it will."

Users should be aware that the placements are also SEO hacks and not genre-focused or targeted. We were only put on 3 playlists, and though large, two were called 2010s Throwbacks and Throwback Bangers (2000s). This is basically the name of the game of playlisting but may be unexpected for some.

It's also worth mentioning that because they didn't place Blur (which is frustrating, because now we had a crummy start to its release streams) we decided to try out YouGrow and Moonstrive Media and both seemed to have totally legit streams (although with SEO playlists also, and some of them shamelessly titled) at basically exactly 2x the rate of Indie Music Academy at the same price range. Alexx reached out to encourage us not to use other services, saying "Be careful with other companies as many claim to be completely organic and are not. If something seems too good to be true, it typically is. Our campaigns are 100% organic so they do take longer." That just doesn't seem to be the case after analyzing all the playlists with isitagoodplaylist.com -- Moonstrive's and Yougrow's placements were equally credible.

Altogether a clunky experience, frustrating support, and super poor delivery of streams / $ invested when compared to competitors.

UPDATED: I received a call shortly after sharing the frustrations from Ryan, who runs Indie Music Academy. He spent an hour on the phone with me apologizing for the imperfect experience, asking what they could do better next time, and also took the time to teach me a lot about playlisting and promo strategies. There's definitely an outsized commitment from Ryan to make sure his platform is solid and that attention is good enough to raise the initial rating I gave.

As an independent, self-produced folk artist - I found IMA's care and professionalism unmatched when it comes to music promotion and long-term guidance. It's a difficult, challenging environment that also has plenty of opportunity for indie artists and bands, given the right expertise in understanding social media and popular streaming platforms (specifically Spotify). Would 100% recommend and will use IMA service for my future releases.

Any product needs advertising to sell, music or beer, or dog food. In May 2023, I had zero listeners and followers on Spotify, now I have 530 listeners and 46 followers. Yes, learning and advertising for one’s music cost money, but music not listened to is silent music.