Pitching, lyrics, credits, Content ID and YouTube for a release.

Once the music has been delivered, the battle takes place within the platforms. Two different jobs coexist there: Pitching to editors, the gateway to editorial playlists, and maintaining the listing — Metadata, Lyrics and Credits — which makes your track understandable, attributable and findable. Alongside them, the video ecosystem has a third front: Content ID and YouTube, where your music may appear in videos you do not control.

None of this replaces a good song. What it does is prevent a good song getting lost through a badly completed form, a poorly framed claim or a pitch sent on release day.

Pitching to editors

Pitching is the formal request you make through Spotify for Artists for editors to hear your track before release. The official rules are clear and worth knowing by heart:

• At least seven days between delivery and release date; more lead time gives more opportunity to listen.
• One track at a time. You can only have one song being pitched; when it is released, you can pitch the next.
• New releases only. You cannot pitch compilations or tracks on which you are a featured artist.
• Editable until release day, without a guarantee that editors will see late changes.
• No guaranteed placement. What an on-time pitch does deliver is inclusion in your followers’ Release Radar.

Pitch contents: a precise genre and subgenre, mood, honest sound references, the track’s story and promotional plans. No impossible promises or lists of achievements: the editor wants to know whether the track fits their playlists and what kind of support you will provide.

A timely, specific pitch is half the work; the other half is ensuring the listing has no errors that cause the track to be rejected unheard.

Metadata that supports the release

Metadata is all the structured information travelling with the track: titles, artists in order, roles, genre, date, territories, content labels and credits. Spotify sums it up with a phrase that captures the issue: they display music exactly as it is delivered. If the data is wrong at the source, it is wrong everywhere.

The most common failure points:

• Artist order. The main artist comes first, with the same formatting as all your earlier releases; the order reads as part of your identity.
• Roles. Performers, composers, lyricists, producers and remixers are declared separately, at track and release level. A wrongly assigned role means a missing credit and, sometimes, missing money.
• Content labels. Mark explicit language if present; adding “explicit” to the title is the silly mistake that spoils the listing.
• Consistency. Artist name, capitalisation and punctuation must be identical to your profile and earlier credits.

If you need preliminary work on your files’ names and tags, the metadata, ID3 and ISRC guide covers that side of the problem.

Lyrics and Credits on platforms

Lyrics are the synchronised words appearing in the app; Credits are the names and roles shown in the track’s listing. Both are delivered with metadata, and both affect how your music is discovered and revenue distributed.

Lyrics have their own mechanics: the work has rights, so platforms work with rights holders and their lyric-synchronisation agreements. In practice, modern distribution services let you send lyrics as part of delivery — some include them at no cost — and they appear synchronised when the system validates them. If another author wrote the lyrics or there is co-authorship, that information must be declared, because it determines the work’s royalties.

Besides their appearance, credits are the attribution mechanism: producer, engineer, composer, remixer. Three tips:

1. Complete every role, including those that are less prominent: the mixing or mastering credit is your professional calling card.
2. Use the same order on every release, so filtering by artist works.
3. Review the listing on release day, when changes propagate to all DSPs.

A correctly placed credit also enables discovery: someone searching for a track’s producer lands on your profile. Relatedly, copyright and registering works explains what to register and when.

Content ID and YouTube

Content ID is YouTube’s automatic identification system: rights holders submit a database of audio and video references, and every upload is compared against it. A match generates a claim, and the rights holder chooses one of the three actions in the table above: block, monetise or track.

There are three practical consequences for you:

• If your music is used in other people’s videos, you can collect revenue rather than prevent it. That is common in reactions, sets, tutorials and gaming videos.
• If you upload material using somebody else’s music, you may receive a claim. That is why you declare only your own or licensed material: an unfounded claim has a cost.
• Decisions are geographical. The same video may be monetised in one country and blocked in another.

Access to Content ID requires holding exclusive rights to a substantial body of original material, and access is requested from YouTube. People distributing their music usually activate it through their distributor, who registers references on the rights holder’s behalf.

It coexists with another issue: videos you upload to your own YouTube channel must be compatible with your own synchronisation agreements and the platform’s rules. A recorded set using third-party music and your own track released with the same energy are handled differently; the general framework for broadcasting and live rights is in the operating broadcasts and copyright guide.

What happens in release week

Release week concentrates all the coordination work:

1. D-7 or less. Confirm that delivery arrived, the date is correct and the pitch has been sent.
2. D-3. Check the listing in the app: title, artist order, cover, lyrics and credits.
3. D-1. Active pre-save link, notices to your list, and video material ready.
4. Day D. Listen to the track on two different services, check for master or version errors, and answer the first messages.
5. D+1. Check pitch statistics, Release Radar, and whether your own videos have Content ID claims.

If something fails, correct it at the source: notify the distributor so they can resend the data. Trying to modify the listing directly on the platform almost never works and sometimes blocks the subsequent correction.

After release

Two weeks later, review what remains: plays by source, playlists it entered, countries, and whether Content ID has recorded uses. That information feeds the next promotional cycle, which shifts from platforms to DJs: receiving other people’s new music, organising your inbox, and responding with sound judgement. That is what the next guide covers.

Next step

With the track released, it is time to handle the other side of the circuit: promotional music arriving in your inbox. Continue with Receiving promos: inbox, organisation, feedback, embargo and watermark.