By John Riesen — co-Founder & Original Curator, Emitha
I want to tell you something I don't say often enough: We built Emitha because we were desperate.
Not desperate in a reckless way. Desperate in the way that only an artist who has poured their soul into something and watched it disappear into silence can understand.
I Was the Artist Who Tried Everything
Before Emitha existed, I was just a musician. A singer. Someone who had spent years developing a voice in a genre that doesn't fit neatly into any algorithm — operatic singing, broadway/theatre vocals, crossover vocals, the kind of music that lives somewhere between classical tradition and contemporary emotion. That was my domain.
In Mar 2020, I was in final production for a beautiful production of Cendrillion (Cinderella in FRENCH!) as Prince Charming with Opera Birmingham in Alabama when the theatre world was shut down and we were all sent home.
Over the course of weeks (and many reading this will remember their own experiences with the same) my agents called to inform me that ALL my upcoming contracts (17, for me) were being cancelled without compensation, as it was a "Force Majeure" or "Act of God."
My wife, and the OG President, CEO and Founder of Emitha, was pregnant with our first child. It was a... difficult few weeks emotionally... to say the least... But, "Necessity Is the mother of invention," they say, and so I dove into what I felt I could: my digital audience and catalogue with the hopes of reaching my audience and making a new income source.
I had released some music that was sitting dormant and I wondered if there was a way for me to crack into the world of streaming. Plus, like every other independent artist, I just plain wanted people to hear my music...
So, as a first step I did what everyone on the internet told me to do. I tried Playlist Push. I tried SubmitHub. I tried YouGrow. I tried Groover. I tried Omari MC. I worked with PR agencies for blogs and news articles. I hired promotion companies. I spent real money — money I didn't have to waste — chasing the promise of real listeners and growth.
As you can imagine (especially if you've tried the same), what I got instead was a mix of poor results and disappointment. Incorrect genre playlists. Bot traffic. Inflated stream counts that meant nothing. Playlist placements that looked impressive on paper and did absolutely nothing for my algorithmic standing. Worse, some of it actively hurt me and my music.
I watched my releases flop. Not because the music wasn't good. But because the system I was using to promote it was broken... and it seemed hopeless...
The Moment I Decided to Build Something Different
There was a specific moment (I remember it clearly) when I sat down and asked myself a question that changed everything:
Is there actually a way to do this right? Or is the entire music promotion industry just smoke and mirrors?
I refused to accept that the answer was the latter. I believed deeply, stubbornly that there had to be a way to build a bridge between an established artist and a real audience. Even for a niche genre like mine. Even for operatic crossover vocals, which no algorithm was built to understand. I had proven through my work on stage, television, and social media that I HAD an audience... so I needed to figure out HOW to reach them.
So I started researching. Not casually. Obsessively. It was 2020, afterall.
I spent tens of thousands of hours — and I mean that literally — studying how Spotify's algorithm actually works. How playlist curators build their audiences. What makes a listener engage authentically versus passively. How genre-specific promotion differs from mainstream pop campaigns. I made phone calls. I had conversations with curators, with label executives, with other independent artists who had found real traction. I tested. I failed. I adjusted. I tested again.
I wasn't building a business at first. I was trying to solve my own problem.
What I Learned That the Industry Doesn't Want You to Know
Here's what years of research taught me:
Most music promotion services are built for volume, not results. They're designed to process as many artists as possible, deliver something that looks like a result, and move on. They don't care whether your streams convert into followers. They don't care whether your algorithmic profile improves. They don't care whether the listeners are real human beings who might actually become fans.
And almost none of them understand genre.
Genre isn't just a label. It's a listener community. It's a curatorial ecosystem. It's a set of algorithmic signals that Spotify uses to decide who to recommend your music to next. If you're an operatic singer and you get placed on a generic "chill vibes" playlist, those listeners aren't going to engage — and that disengagement tells Spotify's algorithm that your music isn't worth pushing further.
Real growth — the kind that compounds, the kind that builds an audience that actually follows you and streams your next release — requires genre-specific placement with real listeners who are already predisposed to love what you do.
That's what I set out to build.
Building Emitha: Ethics as a Foundation, Not a Marketing Line
When I started developing what would become Emitha's promotional system, I made a decision that cost me short-term efficiency but gave me something more valuable: integrity.
I would only work with real sources (Meta Ads, Google Ads, Social Media influencers I actively knew were humans).
No bots. No fake streams. No inflated numbers designed to impress rather than perform. Every placement had to be on a playlist with a genuine audience — people who had chosen to follow that playlist because they loved that genre of music.
Instead of trying to find hundreds of curators to try and pitch to like SO many other services have worked to do, I decided to learn how to get around that issue and just build the playlists and audiences directly...
And so I built a system around that knowledge — one that could be applied not just to my own music, but to any artist in any niche genre who was tired of being burned by the same broken promises I had experienced.
This, along with a few years of trial and error (some blood, some sweat and a few tears), led to cracking that code and helping artists achieve over ONE BILLION streams (!!) something I never thought could be attained.
Why This Matters to You
If you're reading this, you're probably an artist who has been there. You've spent money on promotion that didn't work. You've watched your streams plateau. You've wondered whether your genre is just too niche, too specific, too "difficult" for the algorithm to understand.
I'm here to tell you: it's not your genre. It's the system you've been using to promote it.
Emitha exists because I refused to accept that artists in niche genres deserve worse outcomes than mainstream pop acts. Because I believed that ethical, real, genre-specific promotion wasn't just possible — it was the only kind worth doing.
I built this for myself first. And then I built it for you.
That's what makes us different.
— John Riesen
Founder & Original Curator, Emitha