Music Metadata Explained: Get It Right the First Time

Two weeks before release date, the delivery comes back rejected. Or worse: it ships, and a month later half your streams are sitting on a duplicate artist profile you cannot claim, the featured artist is not credited anywhere a listener can see, and a co-writer is asking why nothing has reached their publisher.

None of that is bad luck. Metadata is the set of text fields and codes attached to your release, and every system downstream — the store's catalogue, the royalty ledger, the recommendation engine, your collection society — keys off those fields. They are matched by machines, mostly by exact string comparison. A field that is nearly right behaves like a field that is wrong.

This guide covers the fields that actually break things, why they break, and what to do instead.

The one rule underneath all the others

Stores and services do not read your intent. They read strings. Two entries match or they do not, and "close enough" resolves to "different".

That single mechanism explains almost every metadata failure. "DJ Sameer" and "DJ Sameer" (two spaces) are different artists. "Nadia Rahman" and "Nadia Rehman" are different people to a publisher's system. A track delivered with no ISRC gets one assigned somewhere downstream, and now the same recording carries two identifiers and two royalty trails.

So the practical discipline is not "be careful". It is: decide the exact form of every recurring name and code once, write it down, and reuse that written record for every release forever.

Artist name: pick one string and never edit it

Your artist name is the primary key that holds your catalogue together. Changing capitalisation, adding or removing "The", swapping a hyphen for an en dash, or adding a period after an initial can be enough to create a second profile.

What to fix before your first release:

• Decide capitalisation and spacing exactly, including any punctuation.
• Decide whether stylisation stays. Full lowercase or all caps is a permanent commitment across every release, and many stores normalise or reject aggressive styling anyway.
• Decide the transliteration if your name is written in a non-Latin script, and keep both forms consistent.
• Store the decision in a plain text file you copy and paste from. Do not retype it.

If you already have releases split across two profiles, the fix is a correction request to your distributor for the affected releases, not a new release under the "right" spelling.

Titles: metadata is not artwork copy

A title field is a catalogue field, not a marketing line. Common rejections and why they happen:

Version information in parentheses is legitimate when it is real: (Live), (Acoustic), (Remix) where a remix genuinely exists. The test is whether a listener could confuse this with another recording of yours. If yes, label it. If no, leave the title clean.

Featured artists are the highest-value fix here. Putting a feature in the artist field, rather than the title string, is what makes the track appear on the featured artist's profile and reach their audience. Typed into the title, it is decoration.

Credits: legal names, not handles

Songwriter and producer credits carry publishing money. Publishing is administered by societies and publishers whose systems match on legal names and registered writer identifiers — not on the name printed on a beat tag.

• Use each writer's full legal name as registered with their society.
• List every writer, including yourself, even on a solo track.
• Agree the split percentages before release, in writing, and keep them with the release record. A split sheet signed at the session is worth more than a memory six months later.
• Keep producer and mixing credits accurate; they feed credit displays and, increasingly, search.

Note the distinction between identifiers: the ISRC identifies a recording, the ISWC identifies the composition, and the UPC identifies the release. They are three different things and one does not substitute for another.

The codes: ISRC and UPC

An ISRC is 12 characters: two for country, three for registrant, two for the year of reference, and five for the designation. The hyphens you often see are a display convention only — they are not part of the code. There is no check digit in an ISRC, so nothing validates a typo for you. One wrong character and the stream reports for that recording go somewhere else.

A new ISRC is required whenever the recording is materially different: a remix, an edit, a live version, an instrumental. It is not required to re-release the same recording, and the ISRC stays with the recording when you change distributor.

Remasters are narrower than most advice suggests. The IFPI ISRC Handbook (§A.10.1) states that a new ISRC is assigned if, and only if, the re-mastering involved creative input applied to the recording itself. It explicitly excludes simple level changes, invariant EQ, invariant compression, de-noising, de-clicking, speed and pitch correction, sample-rate conversion and dithering — "essentially invariant or technological adjustment processes". One rider is safe to state either way: where the remastered version goes on sale as its own track next to the original, you are selling two products, and the second one takes a code of its own.

The UPC identifies the release, not the recording. UPC-A is 12 digits; EAN-13 is 13. A UPC-A becomes an EAN-13 by prefixing a zero, and the check digit does not change. That check digit is computable: from the right, alternate multiplying by 3 and 1 across the digits before it, sum them, and the check digit is whatever brings the total to the next multiple of ten. A UPC with a bad check digit is a typo you can catch yourself — you can verify one in the browser with the ISRC and UPC checker.

Non-Latin script and mixed-direction text

If your metadata is in Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Hebrew or any right-to-left script, the most common corruption is not encoding — it is bidirectional text. The Unicode bidirectional algorithm (UAX #9) decides display order when Latin tokens are mixed into an RTL string, and a Latin word, a number, or a bracketed version tag dropped into an Arabic title can render in a different position than you typed it.

Practical mitigations:

• Keep the script consistent within a single field where possible.
• Check how the string renders in a plain RTL context, not only in your DAW or spreadsheet.
• Supply a transliteration where the store offers a separate field for it, rather than mixing scripts inside one title.
• Follow the Music Biz Metadata Style Guide as the industry reference for field conventions.

Genre, language and the explicit flag

Genre is a routing signal, not a personality statement — pick the genre a listener searching for music like yours would pick. Language should reflect the lyrics, not your nationality. The explicit flag is a factual declaration about lyrical content: marking a clean track explicit narrows its reach, and marking an explicit track clean is a misdeclaration, and stores can act on it — including removing the release.

Pre-release checklist

Run this before every delivery:

• Artist name matches your written record character for character, including spacing.
• Featured artists are in the artist field, not the title.
• Titles contain no promo text, no "(Official Audio)", no emoji, no unnecessary caps.
• Version tags are present only where a second version genuinely exists.
• Every songwriter is listed under their legal name, with splits agreed in writing.
• ISRC is 12 characters, correct for this specific recording, and reused only if the recording is unchanged.
• UPC check digit verifies, and the UPC belongs to this release only.
• Language, genre and explicit flag reflect the actual content.
• Non-Latin fields render correctly in an RTL context, with no stray Latin tokens.

You can check the whole set against store style rules with the metadata checker — it runs in your browser, and no audio is uploaded — and the field-by-field conventions are documented in the metadata reference.

Getting this right once costs an afternoon. Getting it wrong costs a rejected release, a split profile, and royalties you have to chase.