How to Make a Music Release

A music release is made in stages. The master is ready. The artwork is complete. The metadata is written. The identifiers are assigned. The date is chosen. The release is delivered. The service ships it on the day.

This guide follows a single release through all of those stages, in the order they actually happen, and explains what is required at each one.

Start with the master. The master is the recorded audio itself — usually a WAV or an AIFF, exported at the resolution and format the distributor requires. It should be the final mix, not a rough. The most common late-stage problem in a release is discovering that the master sent for delivery is not the master that was approved, and that the approved version still needs a day of work.

Check the master before anything else is built on top of it. Listen to the whole thing, not just the start. Listen on a speaker as well as on headphones. Confirm the loudness is consistent with other releases in the same catalogue, because a release that is noticeably louder or quieter than the artist's other work reads as an error on the platform.

The artwork comes next, and it has hard requirements rather than taste requirements. Streaming services require a square image, generally 3000 by 3000 pixels or larger, in JPG or PNG. The image must not contain a URL, a price, a social handle, or an offer of any kind, because those are rejected by the delivery review. Anything that resembles a badge or a sticker is the most common rejection reason.

The artwork also has to match the release it belongs to. A photograph of the artist is not automatically the right cover for the single, and reusing artwork across several releases in the same catalogue makes them hard to tell apart in a listener's library.

Metadata is the part that determines whether a release can be found and correctly paid. It includes the title, the primary artist, any featured artists, the album or single title, the language, the genre, the release date, the copyright line, the label, and the credits.

Write the metadata exactly as it should appear on the platform, then check it against the artwork and the credits. An artist name spelled one way in the metadata and another way in the credits splits the royalty trail. A featured artist omitted from the credits loses that artist's performance royalties on some services. These are not edge cases; they are the ordinary failures.

Identifiers come next. The ISRC identifies the recording, and every recording should have one, whether it was assigned previously or assigned during delivery. The UPC or EAN identifies the release, and a single, EP, or album each needs its own. The ISRC is what reporting follows, so reusing an ISRC across two different recordings merges their royalties into one line.

Set the release date with room around it, and treat delivery and release as two separate dates. The release date is when the release goes live. The delivery date is when the files are handed over, and it should be earlier. That gap is the buffer in which services process the release and in which a mistake can still be corrected.

On release day the release should already be correct. By the time the date arrives the work is not creating the release, it is confirming it. Check each service the release was sent to, confirm the artwork, the credits, and the date are all correct in the listing, and confirm the release is live rather than still marked as scheduled.

After the release ships the work continues in the dashboard. Reporting becomes available, and the first review is not about numbers. It is about whether the release is being credited correctly, because a metadata error that is corrected in the first weeks costs far less than the same error corrected a year later.

The habit worth keeping is the pre-ship rights review. Before delivery, confirm that every person who contributed to the recording is named in the credits, that the composition is registered, and that the splits in the agreement match the credits that will be submitted. It takes minutes, and it prevents the dispute that would otherwise take months to resolve.