Answers/Getting started/The Independent Release Checklist: What to Do Before, On, and After Release Day

Getting started

The Independent Release Checklist: What to Do Before, On, and After Release Day

By Boboy Watson·Last verified August 31, 2026·1,926 words·Getting started

The release I got most wrong was not the music. The distributor created a second Spotify artist profile because the artist name had an extra space in the metadata, and for three weeks the streams went to a profile I did not control while I promoted a link to the empty one.

Every part of a release that goes wrong goes wrong in the same way: something invisible, decided weeks earlier, that nobody checks on the day. So here is the checklist, in order, with the lead times attached.

What do you do before, on, and after release day?

1. Four weeks out, sign a split sheet with every contributor. Record each person's legal name, role, PRO affiliation, IPI/CAE number, publisher entity, contact details and percentage of the writing share, with the percentages totalling exactly 100% — see how to fill out a split sheet for every field.
2. Four weeks out, register the work at ASCAP or BMI using the numbers on that split sheet. Enter the title exactly as it will be released, list every writer with their IPI number, and attach your publisher entity to the publisher share if you have one — the full process is in how to register with ASCAP or BMI.
3. Four weeks out, register the same work at The MLC with identical shares. Mismatched splits between your PRO registration and your MLC registration are the most common reason a work sits unmatched and pays nobody; how to register with The MLC covers the member types and the ACH setting.
4. Four weeks out, upload the release to DistroKid, TuneCore or CD Baby with a release date at least four weeks ahead. A short lead time forfeits editorial playlist consideration, pre-save windows and any chance to fix a metadata rejection before the date.
5. Four weeks out, decide whether this release gets a US Copyright Office registration and which form it uses. A Single Application is $45 for one work by one author who is the sole claimant; Group Registration of Works on an Album of Music is $65 for an album — see how to register a song with the US Copyright Office.
6. Three weeks out, capture the ISRC from your distributor dashboard and write it onto the split sheet. The ISRC is assigned at upload and it is the identifier The MLC and SoundExchange match usage against.
7. Three weeks out, add the recording to your SoundExchange repertoire in both roles. Register as a featured artist and as the sound recording copyright owner, because a self-releasing artist is normally both — how to register with SoundExchange explains why the second role is the larger share.
8. Three weeks out, check that the artist name, track title, featured artist credits and songwriter credits are byte-identical everywhere. The distributor upload, the artwork text, your PRO registration and your MLC registration should all spell the artist name exactly the same way, spaces included.
9. Three weeks out, verify the artwork meets your distributor's specification and contains no store logos, URLs or unlicensed images. Artwork rejection is the most common cause of a missed release date and it is entirely preventable.
10. At least seven days out, pitch the unreleased track through Spotify for Artists. Spotify asks that pitches for editorial consideration are submitted at least seven days before release, and pitching also guarantees the track lands in your followers' Release Radar.
11. One week out, confirm you have claimed your profiles at Spotify for Artists and Apple Music for Artists. Claiming in advance is what stops a distributor creating a duplicate profile for your release.
12. On release day, open every store and confirm the release actually landed. Check Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, Tidal and Deezer individually rather than trusting the distributor status page, because stores go live at different times and some fail silently.
13. On release day, check the credits and metadata on each store listing. Artist name spelling, featured artists, track title, explicit flag, release date and songwriter credits where the store displays them.
14. On release day, confirm the release is attached to your existing artist profile and not a new duplicate. If a duplicate appeared, claim it through Spotify for Artists or Apple Music for Artists and request a merge immediately, before follows and playlist adds accumulate on the wrong one.
15. On release day, confirm the ISRC in your distributor dashboard matches what the stores report. A mismatched or missing ISRC breaks SoundExchange matching and makes MLC matching harder.
16. In week one, confirm the work now appears in The MLC public database with your claim on it. Search the title in the public search rather than assuming your registration went through.
17. In week two, confirm the work appears in the ASCAP or BMI repertoire search with the correct writers and shares. Public repertoire search is how you catch a registration that failed validation quietly.
18. Within three months of release, file the copyright registration if you decided to make one. Registering within three months of first publication preserves eligibility for statutory damages and attorney's fees under 17 U.S.C. 412 — put the deadline in a calendar on release day.
19. At the first royalty statement, read it for missing platforms rather than for the total. A platform that appears for one release and not another is a distribution problem you can still fix; a small total is just a small total.
20. At roughly 90 days, check that The MLC has produced a statement covering the release month. The MLC pays about 75 days after the end of each monthly usage period, so a September release shows up around mid-December.

What is the timeline at a glance?

Why does everything on the composition side happen before release?

Because claiming forwards is straightforward and claiming backwards is not.

Performance royalties at ASCAP and BMI accrue from the first public performance of a work. If the work is not in the repertoire database when the performance data arrives, there is nothing for that data to match against, and recovering it means a backwards claim process that is slower and more limited than simply being registered on the day.

The MLC works the same way with a different mechanism. Mechanical royalties on unmatched compositions are held rather than lost, but they sit in a pool until somebody registers a claim, and every month you are unregistered adds another distribution cycle to the delay.

SoundExchange is the same again: play reports arrive from SiriusXM, Pandora and webcasters, and recordings with no registered claimant end up on the unclaimed list.

None of these three registrations takes more than about ten minutes per work once the accounts exist. Doing them four weeks early costs nothing and removes the entire category of problem.

What actually goes wrong on release day?

Five failure modes account for most of it, and every one is invisible unless you go and look.

• A duplicate artist profile. The distributor created a new Spotify or Apple Music artist rather than attaching the release to your existing one, usually because of a spelling or spacing difference in the artist name field.
• A store that silently did not receive the release. Distribution status shows delivered; the store shows nothing. Amazon Music and Tidal are frequent offenders on timing.
• Wrong or missing credits. Featured artists absent, songwriter credits blank, the explicit flag set incorrectly.
• An ISRC mismatch. The distributor reports one code and the store lists another, usually after a re-upload, which breaks SoundExchange matching later.
• Artwork that failed review and pushed the date. Store logos, URLs, unlicensed photographs and text that does not match the release title all cause rejection.

Checking all five takes fifteen minutes on the day. Discovering them two months later, from a royalty statement that does not add up, takes considerably longer to fix.

What do you check on the first royalty statement?

Not the total. The total on a first statement is meaningless — it covers a partial month, on a delayed reporting cycle, before any of the composition-side registrations have produced anything.

What to look for instead:

• Which platforms appear. Compare the list against the stores you confirmed on release day. A missing platform on the statement that was live on release day is a delivery or reporting problem worth raising with your distributor now.
• Whether territories look plausible. Streams in countries you have no audience in are usually fine; zero streams in your own country is not.
• Whether the recording is credited to the right release. Re-uploads and metadata corrections sometimes split reporting across two entries.
• Whether any composition-side income appears at all. It generally will not this early, and that is expected — The MLC pays about 75 days after the end of the usage month and ASCAP and BMI distribute quarterly with a further lag.

What is the per-release cost of doing all of this?

Once the accounts exist, almost nothing.

The registrations that collect money are free or close to it. The expensive-looking part of this checklist — copyright registration — is the one part that collects nothing, and it is optional and situational. Do not let its price tag make you skip the free ones.

What does the routine look like once it is a habit?

Roughly forty minutes per release, in three sittings.

At the session: ten minutes for the split sheet, signed by everyone, with IPI numbers filled in. Four weeks out: twenty minutes to register the work at ASCAP or BMI, register it at The MLC, upload to your distributor and add the recording to SoundExchange once the ISRC exists. On the day: fifteen minutes of verification across every store.

That does not grow as your catalog grows. It is the same forty minutes on your fortieth release as on your first, and it is the difference between a catalog that is fully connected to every organisation collecting for it and one that is producing money nobody can route to you.

Written from my own release routine as an independent artist, not as legal or financial advice — fees, lead times and platform requirements change, so confirm the current details with each organisation before you rely on them.