Picture this: You've spent weeks perfecting your track. The mix is tight, the master sounds incredible, and you're ready to show the world what you've got. You upload through your distributor, set your release date, and wait.
But weeks later, you're staring at streaming numbers that don't make sense. Your mates can't find your song when they search for it. Your royalty statement shows less than you expected. And that remix you featured on? It doesn't even appear on your artist profile.
Truthfully, there's around $2.5 billion in unclaimed royalties floating around the music industry right now, and poor metadata is the main reason for this. That's not a typo. Billions of dollars just sitting around waiting to be sent to the artist that deserves them, money that belongs to artists who made simple, avoidable mistakes when uploading their music.
We unfortunately see these errors almost daily at Kinjari. While we take care of fixing them when we can, most of them take about thirty seconds to prevent if you know what to look for and doing so can prevent any issues slipping through the cracks.
You may have more than one artist profile
The single most common metadata mistake we see is inconsistent artist name spelling. It sounds almost too simple to matter, but it's destroying discovery rates for thousands of independent artists.
Here's how it happens. You release your first single as "The Midnight" on one distributor. Six months later, you switch distributors and accidentally submit as "Midnight" without the "The". Or maybe you typed "DJ Khaled" once and "Dj Khaled" another time. Spotify and Apple Music now think you're two different artists. They create separate profiles. Your monthly listeners get split between pages. Your algorithmic recommendations tank because the platforms can't work out who you actually are.
This isn't hypothetical. In Spotify's community forum, you'll find countless artists discovering their catalogues are fragmented across multiple profiles. The fix required contacting Spotify directly and filling out content mismatch forms, a process that takes weeks and doesn't always succeed.
The solution is almost embarrassingly simple. Create a master document with your exact artist name spelling. Copy and paste it for every release. Never type it manually. If you're releasing through Kinjari, just pick your artist name from the dropdown when you upload, we've already got it saved exactly as it should be, so you can't accidentally create duplicate profiles.
ISRC codes are the skeleton key to your royalties
ISRC stands for International Standard Recording Code, and it's a unique 12-character identifier assigned to each of your recordings. Think of it as your song's fingerprint. Every streaming platform, performance rights organisation, and royalty collection society uses ISRCs to track plays and pay artists. (If you want to understand exactly how ISRCs work and why they matter, we've written a complete guide to ISRCs here.)
Without proper ISRCs, you essentially don't exist in the royalty system.
The mistake most artists make isn't forgetting ISRCs entirely (modern distributors like us generate them automatically). The real problem is reusing the same ISRC for different versions of the same song. Your original track, acoustic version, radio edit, and remix all need separate codes. They're different recordings, even if they share the same underlying composition.
When you reuse an ISRC, streams from your acoustic version get attributed to the original. Billboard chart tracking gets confused. Copyright protection becomes impossible. And the money? It ends up in limbo.
One musician documented in The Verge lost approximately $40,000 in royalties across 70 songs over six years because of a database glitch that removed his credits. By the time the metadata was corrected, too much time had passed. Collection societies have sunset clauses (typically two to three years) after which unclaimed royalties get redistributed to other artists based on market share.
Your money, going to someone who already has plenty of it.
Genre tags aren't about ego, they're about how you sit in algorithms
Artists chronically misjudge genre tagging. They either pick aspirational genres that don't match their sound, or they choose something so broad it becomes meaningless.
Tagging yourself as "Pop" when you make lo-fi bedroom beats means Spotify's algorithm will never serve your tracks to the right listeners. Editorial playlist curators filter submissions by genre first. If you've mislabelled yourself as Classical when you make Indie Rock, the Indie Rock Rising playlist team will never see your pitch.
The Lil Nas X "Old Town Road" controversy perfectly shows how seriously the industry takes genre classification. Billboard removed the track from Hot Country Songs, arguing it didn't embrace enough elements of today's country music. The song had debuted simultaneously on the Hot 100, Hot Country Songs, and Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs, a metadata classification nightmare that sparked weeks of industry debate and accusations of inconsistent standards.
The irony? The controversy propelled the song to 19 consecutive weeks at number one on the Hot 100, the longest-running chart-topper at that time. But most of us don't have the luxury of controversy-driven viral momentum.
Research how artists with similar sounds are categorised on Spotify and Apple Music. Be specific with sub-genres when available. "Future Bass" or "Indie Pop" tells algorithms far more than just "Electronic" or "Pop". And don't chase trending genres that don't match your actual sound, it'll just confuse the recommendation engine and hurt your long-term discoverability.
Missing songwriter credits is leaving money on the table
Publishing royalties are calculated from songwriting and composition credits. If your collaborator's name doesn't match their performing rights organisation account (even slightly), their share gets frozen. Sometimes this triggers what's called a "split dispute" that freezes everyone's money, including yours.
The average number of songwriters on a top 10 streaming hit is now 9.1 people. That's nine opportunities for spelling errors, missing credits, or attribution confusion.
Tyler White, Product Manager in Spotify's Music Publishers and Songwriters group, said that accurate publishing metadata is essential to ensure songwriters get paid, and that credits are like your business card for the next opportunity.
Here's what we recommend: keep track of all contributors during the music-making process. Agree on splits before release, not after. Use exact legal names as registered with PROs like ASCAP, BMI, or PRS. Verify the spelling against their official registrations. This way you can ensure everyone gets paid their fair share of the revenue accurately, and on time.
Your featuring artist formatting is maybe possibly wrong
There's a right way and a wrong way to credit featured artists, and unfortunately many indie musicians get it wrong.
The industry standard is "(feat. Artist Name)", lowercase "feat." with a full stop, wrapped in parentheses. Not "ft.", not "Feat", not "featuring", not "w/". These variations cause problems across platforms.
Apple Music auto-concatenates featuring artist information from your metadata. Wrong formatting causes display errors or outright rejection. If your featured rapper isn't listed in the proper metadata field, the track won't appear on their artist page. You miss out on cross-promotion to their fanbase. They miss proper credit and royalties.
For electronic and dance producers, this problem compounds with remixes. The Association for Electronic Music estimates that 30-50% of electronic artists' catalogues may not display on their profiles because remixes aren't properly linked. For artists like Meduza or R3HAB, who generate a huge portion of their streams from remixed works, this represents a catastrophic loss of discoverability.
The format for remixes should be "Track Title (DJ X Remix)" with the original artist remaining as the primary artist. The remixer gets credited in the dedicated Remixer field and in the track title. Each remix needs its own unique ISRC. Miss any of these steps, and the track becomes disconnected from both artists' profiles.
What you can do right now
Every modern distributor should catch basic metadata errors before your music goes live. At Kinjari, our review process specifically looks for the inconsistencies we've outlined here: fragmented artist names, missing ISRCs, improper featuring artist formatting. For $3 a month, you get distribution to 100+ platforms and a real, human team that carefully checks and corrects all of your metadata before it causes problems.
However, we aren't perfect, and so the protection is knowing what to look for yourself. Create a master spreadsheet tracking all titles, ISRCs, UPCs, credits, and release dates. Copy and paste artist names, never type them manually. IF you have your own ISRC stem, make sure you use a new ISRCs for every version (acoustic, remix, radio edit, remaster). Alternatively, leave the field blank when uploading and we'll issue a new one for you.
Always make sure you use the exact standard featuring format: "(feat. Artist Name)". Research genre tags by checking how similar artists are categorised. Agree on songwriter splits and spelling before submission. Make sure you review everything before hitting the upload button.
Metadata isn't glamorous. Nobody writes songs about properly formatted ISRC codes. But with 60,000 to 120,000 new tracks uploaded to streaming platforms every single day, the difference between being found and being buried can be driven by to these invisible data fields.
That $2.5 billion in unclaimed royalties represents real artists who made real music and never got paid for it. The collection societies will hold that money for a few years, then redistribute it to artists who already earn millions. Your money doesn't sit there waiting for you forever.
The good news? None of these mistakes are complicated to fix. They just require knowing they exist.
Now you do.
At Kinjari, we review every release before distribution to catch metadata issues that could hurt your streaming numbers and royalty payments. For $3 a month with 90% royalties, you get global distribution plus a team that cares about getting the details right.
