Artist Story· 2949 Studio
The pre-ship review that prevents disputes
The mistakes that cost the most are not creative ones. They are credit and split errors, and they are all preventable.
Most of the expensive problems in a release are creative disagreements, and creative disagreements are normal. The expensive problems are administrative, and they are almost entirely avoidable.
We ask every artist to run a short review before a release is handed over. It takes minutes. It covers four things: every contributor to the recording is named in the credits, the composition is registered, the splits in the written agreement match the credits being submitted, and the identifiers are correct.
When those four things line up, almost nothing goes wrong later. When they do not, the problem surfaces months afterwards — usually as a royalty dispute, usually involving someone who contributed a small part and has not been paid for it.
A session guitarist who is not in the credits does not get performance royalties on some services. A co-writer missing from the composition registration does not receive their share. Neither mistake is visible on the streaming page. Both are settled later, in writing, between people who no longer remember the session.
We have watched artists lose weeks to this. The fix is a checklist.
It is not glamorous work and it does not make a good story, but it is the part of distribution that most reliably protects an artist's money and their relationships.
