The first-release checklist

Sign the split sheet day of the session

Hard to reverse. Not when the song is finished. Not when it starts doing numbers. The day it's made, while everyone is in the room and nobody has anything to gain by remembering it differently.

Every person who contributed creatively goes on it, including the friend who suggested one line. Especially them, because an unrecorded 5% claim is the single most common way independent releases turn into arguments. Use the calculator; it prints something signable.

Lock the artist name and check it's free before your first upload, ever

Hard to reverse. Search your intended name on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, Instagram, and your national trademark register. If someone active already has it, change yours now. Changing it after you have listeners means restarting the artist profile and losing whatever algorithmic history you built.

Also decide the exact capitalisation and spacing now, because "Lil Wave", "LilWave" and "LIL WAVE" can end up as three separate artist profiles with your catalogue split across them.

Register with a PRO weeks before release

Your performing rights organisation collects performance royalties: APRA AMCOS in Australia and New Zealand, ASCAP or BMI in the US, PRS in the UK. Registration takes a while to process, so do it before you need it, not after.

This is separate from your distributor. Your distributor collects recording royalties. Your PRO collects songwriting royalties. Nobody collects both automatically, and money you never register for is money that sits in a pot unclaimed.

Get the masters right before export

Export WAV, 16-bit or 24-bit, 44.1kHz or higher. Not MP3, not a bounce of a bounce. If your mix is loud enough to be clipping, streaming platforms will turn it down anyway, because loudness normalisation means a crushed master just sounds worse at the same volume as everyone else's.

Keep an unmastered version and the project file. You will want them for the instrumental, the clean edit, the sync request, and the remix.

Artwork to spec before upload

3000×3000px, square, RGB, JPG or PNG. No URLs, no social handles, no logos you don't own, no "featuring" text that isn't also in the metadata. Stores reject artwork for all of these, and rejection means your release date moves.

Check it at 60 pixels. That is the size most people will actually see it. If the title is unreadable at thumbnail size, the artwork doesn't work, no matter how good it looks full-screen.

Write the metadata down before you type it in before upload

Hard to reverse. Metadata propagates to dozens of stores and fixing it later is slow and often incomplete. Decide, in a document, before you touch the upload form:

• Exact track title, including whether it's "(feat. X)" or "ft. X". Pick one and use it everywhere forever
• Every featured artist, spelled as their profile spells it
• Songwriter legal names, meaning legal names and not artist names
• Producer credits
• Explicit or clean, marked correctly (getting this wrong gets you pulled from playlists)
• Genre and secondary genre
• ISRC, which your distributor issues. If you already have one for this recording, reuse it rather than generating a second

Upload at least 4 weeks out not 5 days

Hard to reverse. The single most expensive scheduling mistake is uploading too late to pitch. Spotify's editorial pitch requires an unreleased track, so once the song is live, that door is shut for that song, permanently.

Four weeks also gives you room to survive a store rejection, whether that's bad artwork, a metadata mismatch or a copyright flag on a sample, without moving the date.

Pitch it, properly immediately after upload

One pitch per release through Spotify for Artists. Describe the mood, instrumentation, the story, and the audience. Skip the biography. The editors are matching songs to playlists, not evaluating your career.

Being pitched matters even if you don't get an editorial placement, because it's a signal into the algorithmic systems that feed Release Radar and Discover Weekly.

Claim your profiles as soon as the release is delivered

Spotify for Artists and Apple Music for Artists. Do it now, while you remember. These are where you'll see who's actually listening and where they are, which is the only data that tells you where a show would sell.

Friday, and know why release day

Global release day is Friday. A Friday release gets a full week of streams counted into your first chart week and lands you in that week's Release Radar. Releasing on a Tuesday splits your opening numbers across two reporting weeks for no benefit.

Register the song with your PRO release week

Separate step from registering yourself. The work itself has to be registered, with the splits matching your signed split sheet exactly. Mismatched splits are the reason publishing money sits uncollected for years.

Set the renewal reminder release week, takes 30 seconds

Calendar reminder two weeks before your distributor renews, on a card that isn't about to expire. If the subscription lapses, the catalogue comes down, and re-uploading can cost you the playlist placements and play counts attached to the original. See what distribution actually costs.