ApoloneReviews of apolone.com

Apolone is a hard sell promoter for song placement. Initial buy in is at $39 (in May 2026). I have written songs for decades, with some professional experience recording for Columbia Records as a kid for established industry writers and producers. The music industry is a difficult maze with a staggeringly low success rate. While I have no expectations for commercial success, I would like to find a larger streaming audience that might enjoy my music. I wanted to test out a couple of song placement services in preparation for teaching a songwriting class this fall at a community college. I anticipate that students will have all kinds of ambitions and questions about promoting their songs. This review is for Apolone. I have another posting you can find for Groover, but I have a sense that what I have to say may apply to many song placement services. I was intrigued by Apolone because it starts out by putting your music through a bot that assesses the commercial potential of the overall acoustical structure of the music—not the lyrics etc. I put about 10 of my songs through the analyzer and the ratings came back ranging from about 65% potential (or percentile, I could not tell) potential to 77% potential commercial value. Apolone considered all of the songs to have good commercial potential value. I went with the song that had the 77% rating. The song is a retro country style dance tune. Apolone indicated that it would pitch my song to three Spotify country music playlist curators. These playlists exist and can be found if one has the link to them. However, I could not find two of the playlists when searching Spotify by playlist and curator names. I infer that it might be a stretch for a listener to discover those lists. The list I found by search held 102 songs representing about 6 hours of music time. Based on name recognition, the first 40 songs on the playlist represented existing country music stars. So, unless a listener played by shuffle, it would take 2 hours before a newbie songwriter got a play. All three of the curators passed on my song. Upon scrutiny of each list, my retro country song was not a good fit for these playlists that focused on contemporary music and there is no fault in that. Following the rejections, Apolone wrote, “Your song is performing well so far! Production and songwriting are getting positive feedback.” Really? In general, I would say that unless your song falls into a readily identifiable genre and subgenre that matches well with potential playlist curators, you are probably going to have a difficult time with placements. This problem will not be solved by spending more money on a larger campaign. I would not recommend that aspiring songwriters use these song placement services—besides throwing your money down a rabbit hole of false hopes and promises, the results may also be hurtful to confidence and pride in your creative efforts. These playlist curators are nowhere near being music industry A&R executives who can move the needle on your song or career. Likely, they have nothing to offer you but placement at the bottom of a long list of songs that few will end up hearing. I contacted the person assigned to my account and had a very nice thread of email correspondence with him. He seemed to me to be a genuinely good person with the best intentions to help get songs placed with appropriate curators. He seemed to care and wanted to please me. After this thread, he got my song placed on two playlists. In looking at the lists, each playlist seemed to represent an elephant graveyard mishmash of genres that no one would ever find, and if someone did, would probably not listen to songs on the list. Maybe the Apolone placement service works for someone occasionally. I think the odds are poor. However, you can create your own public Spotify playlist, and if no own listens to it, you still will have saved yourself some money.

I purchased an Apolone campaign after being presented with estimated results of 500–1,500 streams, 80–150 new followers, additional reach of up to 45,000 listeners, a 30-day money-back guarantee, and promotional claims regarding playlist reach and exposure. The issue is not that I expected guaranteed results. The issue is that the expectations used during the sales process did not align with what was ultimately delivered. After reviewing the playlists, campaign activity, and actual performance, the campaign fell significantly short of the estimates and projections that were used to market the service. When I raised these concerns, I was directed back to the Terms of Service rather than provided with a meaningful resolution. I also noticed playlist ratings, feedback, and campaign-related information appearing after concerns had already been raised regarding the quality of the campaign, which reduced my confidence in the transparency and reliability of the reporting. Additionally, the feedback and pitching activity I received was largely associated with playlists reporting relatively small listener counts. Based on the playlists presented to me, it is difficult to understand how the campaign could realistically achieve the listener reach and performance estimates that were used during the sales process. Customers should pay very close attention to the distinction between estimated results presented in marketing materials and what is actually guaranteed under the Terms of Service. Based on my experience, those were not the same thing. I requested a refund and was informed that refunds are generally handled as store credit despite the prominent marketing references to a 30-day money-back guarantee. Based on my experience, I would not purchase this service again.

I work as a curator for Apolone and really love how the platform is optimised with a friendly and responsive support team. Definitely plan to stick with the service and continue a successful collaboration.

I don’t even know where to begin. I guess my hope is someone will read this and run the other way. First their presentation is where they spend their efforts. It was well put together on a zoom call. What we were promised was 2 million impressions through highly specialized Instagram reels that were specific to our song and genre. They had a team of people who were going to piece it together and would be content specific. What I got was about 4-5 reels that were absolute embarrassing trash. The impressions had to be bot generated. The comments were bizarre. And for what they created the views were no doubt fake. I reached out to them multiple times to schedule a call. I got a response but still nothing scheduled. I’m so tired of companies taking musicians hard earned money and doing nothing. Spend your money elsewhere.

I don't like that you are constantly in an upsell posture. If I had 5,000 dollars for a guaranteed shot, don't you think I would spend it? I don't like dealing from the position that because I don't have money... I must not believe in myself.

This service is a complete scam. I advise anyone to keep looking elsewhere because this is not where you want to spend your money. The service these people provide is completely fake. There may be a handful of actual curators, but not the tier of curators that you are being promised. Most of them are bots, and a extremely high amount of them don't exist at all. So, you'll see generic messages where curators are declining your submission to their playlist, but they all have the same pre-canned response, which is not completely uncommon to have pre-canned responses available for people to choose from. But when you research these curators, the majority don't exist on any platform, and certainly the not on the platform that they're actually saying they pitched it to. So, continue to move on. If you've been scammed by these people, contact me, because we are filing a class action lawsuit against them.

Very satisfied with my new promotion results. My #1 concern when using such services are artificial streams but Apolone has proven to me that they work with real curators that provide organic engagement through their playlists.

I really wanted to like this service after seeing their ads on social media. Unfortunately, my experience has been subpar. I started with a small campaign to test their service. I paid $39 for a chance to be put onto active Spotify playlists. What I received is being added to one playlist that has over 1000 followers but apparently only a few active listeners. I realize Apolone doesn't control the curators and what they want to add to their playlists. However, after only be added to one playlist out of 3 chances, I have only seen about 50-70 plays over the past 25 days. That isn't worth $39 at any time. I have used other services in the past few weeks similar to Apolone and have had better results for less cost. When I let Apolone customer service know that I thought paying $39 for their service was criminal, I received an email stating how they don't control the curators and other factors. What they do control is what curators they send the song to, so maybe they should send the song out to more playlists to avoid an unhappy customer? When a song is only accepted by 1 curator I would think Apolone would understand a customer is going to be unhappy. Well, here I am, unhappy. For my discontentment, Apolone offered me a 10% discount on a future promotion. Why would anyone want to spend more money with a company that hasn't produced decent results is beyond me. It should be beyond them too. I can say with certainty if Jaxson used his own service and got 50-70 streams of a song for $39 and was offered a 10% discount ($3.90 savings for the promotion I used) for another another unreliable chance to get streams, he would say no, emphatically. Which is what I am saying now. Please, for the love of all this is good, try a different service. My success rate elsewhere has been much better with several of my songs getting over 300 streams during that same time without Apolone.