Before you upload

Five minutes here saves a fortnight later. A release that comes back rejected has to be corrected and re-delivered, and the stores are slower the second time.

• You own the recording, or you have written permission from whoever does.
• You know who wrote the song. Not who performed it — who wrote it.
• You have the finished master, not a rough mix or a bounce with a limiter still on the master bus.
• You have square cover art at 3000 × 3000 pixels.
• Nobody else is currently distributing this exact recording. If they were, it has been taken down there first.

Your audio file

We take FLAC masters only. It is lossless, so nothing is thrown away between your studio and the stores.

• FLAC, 16-bit or 24-bit, 44.1 kHz or higher.
• Do not export an MP3 and convert it to FLAC. It does not put the quality back, and it is audible to store QC.
• Leave a little headroom — peaks around −1 dB. The stores apply their own loudness normalisation, so squashing it flat gains you nothing and costs you dynamics.
• No silence padding at the start. No fade-in on a track that does not have one.
• One file per track. If it is an EP or album, upload each track separately under the same release.

Song title and artist name

The single most common cause of rejection is text that does not match. Whatever you type here has to match what is on the cover art, exactly.

• Just the title. Not "O Jaane (Official Audio)", not "O Jaane | New Song 2026", not "O Jaane HD".
• No emojis, no URLs, no social handles, no phone numbers.
• No ALL CAPS unless the title genuinely is an acronym.
• Featured artists go in the Featured artists field, and in the title as "Song Title (feat. Artist)" — lowercase, with the dot. Never "Ft.", "FEAT", or "X & Y" jammed into the title.
• Version information goes in brackets: "Song Title (Acoustic)", "Song Title (Remastered)". Do not write "Original" or "Album Version" — the stores treat those as noise.
• Artist name: one artist per field. Do not write "Artist A x Artist B". Avoid "Official", "Music", "Records" in an artist name — it triggers manual review.

Genre

Pick what the song sounds like to a stranger — not where it came from, not what it is about. Genre does not change your royalties. It decides who the recommendation engines play it to, which over a year is worth far more.

A wrong genre is not rejected. It is just ignored, which is worse, because you never find out it was the problem.

Two traps worth knowing. Soundtrack means the recording was actually in a film or a show — if your song merely sounds cinematic and was never in anything, do not use it. And do not file a devotional song under New Age because it is calm; New Age means ambient wellness music, and a bhajan filed there reaches people looking for spa playlists.

World is the last resort. Every store has it, nobody browses it, and the editorial teams read it as "they did not know". A narrower genre that is eighty percent right beats World every time.

Secondary genre is optional and it is for a second real audience — Devotional & Spiritual plus Indian Classical, say, or Bollywood plus Dance. If it would just be a synonym of the first one, leave it blank.

Songwriter and credits

The songwriter field is required by every store, and it has to be a real person. Not the label, not the band name, not "Various".

There are two separate things in every song, and people confuse them constantly. The recording is the audio file — whoever paid for the session usually owns it. The composition is the song itself, the melody and the words — that belongs to whoever wrote it. Owning the recording does not give you the composition. They are different rights, held by different people, and the composition is the one that causes trouble later.

• Writer known and alive → their name, legal name where you have it.
• Writer has died → still credit them. Death does not end authorship, and it does not end the copyright — it passes to their family. See the next section.
• A genuinely traditional song with no known author → write "Traditional". That is a recognised credit, not a cop-out. If someone arranged this version, add them: "Traditional, arr. Name".
• You know someone wrote it but not who → do not submit it yet. That is not a missing detail, it is a missing right, and it will come back as a claim.
• Producer → fill it in if you know it, leave it blank if you do not.

Old recordings, and songs by someone who has died

Back catalogue is the awkward case. The form asks for a dozen facts and a twenty-year-old song comes with three of them.

The rule: leave a field blank rather than invent a value. A blank is a missing fact and nobody minds. A wrong value is a false statement that travels to every store in the world and has to be corrected across all of them.

• Released before and you know the old ISRC → tell us, and we will reuse it. One recording keeps one ISRC forever; a second one splits its history in two.
• Released before but the ISRC is lost → we issue a new one, and the old streaming history is gone. Worth digging for it first.
• Never commercially released → we issue a new ISRC. This is the normal case for something that sat on a hard drive.
• Original release date → only fill it if the recording was commercially released before. A YouTube or SoundCloud upload is not a commercial release.
• A remaster, re-record or different mix is a different recording and gets its own ISRC. Only identical audio reuses the old one.

When the writer has died, credit them anyway, and expect their share to belong to their family. That is not a formality — copyright outlives the author by decades, and it passes to whoever inherits. A verbal blessing from a friend while he was alive is a lovely thing, but it is not an assignment, and it does not bind his heirs.

What to do, in order: credit them properly in the songwriter field; leave their writer share reserved rather than taking it; and get something short and signed from a family member confirming you may release the recording. It does not need a lawyer. A note from a son or daughter saying who they are and that they agree is worth more than any amount of good intention.

Release dates

Two date fields, and they mean different things.

Friday is the industry release day and the charts are built around it. Pick a Friday unless you have a reason not to.

Cover art

Technically simple, and still the thing that gets rejected most. The upload form checks the size and shape for you. It cannot check what is in the picture — that part is yours.

And the rejection list. Any one of these sends the release back:

• Any website address, social handle, email or phone number. Not even small, not even in the corner. This is the number one rejection.
• Store names or logos — Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, Amazon.
• Prices, QR codes, barcodes, or words like "out now", "new single", "free download".
• Text that does not match the metadata. If the cover says O Jaane, the title field says O Jaane. Not "O Jaane (Official)", not a different spelling.
• Images you do not have the rights to — stock photos with watermarks, film stills, film posters, press photos, brand logos, other people's album covers.
• A recognisable person who has not agreed to it, including someone who has died. Their likeness still belongs to their family in most places.
• Blurry, pixelated or obviously placeholder art.

Almost every cover that works is one strong image, the artist name and the title. Nothing else. Remember where people actually see it — a fifty-pixel square in a phone queue. Shrink yours to a thumbnail; if the title is unreadable, the design is not finished.

AI disclosure

There are two checkboxes on the upload form: one for AI-assisted music, one for AI-generated artwork. Tick them if they apply.

AI is allowed. Hiding it is not. Several stores now require the disclosure and are getting better at detecting it independently, and an undisclosed AI release found later damages the standing of every release we deliver, not just yours. It costs you nothing to tick the box.

What happens after you submit

You can follow the whole thing from your releases page. Each stage shows as a badge.

Moving your music here from another distributor

You can bring your existing releases across and keep every play you have earned. There is one rule, and getting it wrong is permanent — so please read this bit properly.

Every recording has a permanent serial number called an ISRC. It is given to the recording when it is first released and it never changes. The stores count your plays against that number — not against your distributor. So as long as the number stays the same, your plays come with you.

What we need from you before we start:

• Your song list with the ISRC codes. Your current distributor's dashboard shows them — usually under the release details.
• The original audio files, at the best quality you still have.
• The original cover art, if you have it.
• Confirmation that you own these recordings and nobody else is distributing them.

If you cannot find the ISRC codes, tell us — we can usually work them out from the audio itself, and you can look any code up on our free tool at musicmcn.com/isrc.

One thing that will look alarming and is not: our copyright scanner will flag every one of your existing songs. It is matching them against your own earlier release — which is exactly what it should do. We handle it; you do not need to do anything.

Why releases get rejected

In rough order of how often we see it. Almost all of it is preventable in the ten minutes before you hit submit.

• A URL, handle or phone number on the cover art.
• Cover text that does not match the title or artist name exactly.
• Artwork under 3000 × 3000, or not square.
• Promotional words in the title — "Official", "New", "Out Now", "HD", "Full Song".
• Featured artists written into the title instead of the proper (feat. Artist) format.
• Missing or fake songwriter — the label name, the band name, or nothing at all.
• Missing genre.
• Artwork using someone else's photo, film still or logo.
• Audio that turns out to be an MP3 converted to FLAC.
• A copyright fingerprint match that has not been resolved.