Titles, Tags and Credits: The Boring Stuff That Gets You Found

The least romantic thing that matters

Nobody starts making music dreaming about metadata. But I've watched real songs with real momentum go missing — royalties unpaid, searches leading nowhere, an artist page split in two — because of a typo in a form someone filled out at midnight. Metadata is plumbing. Invisible when right, catastrophic when wrong, and almost entirely under your control.

Your name is a search term

Decide the exact spelling, capitalization, and spacing of your artist name once, and use it identically on every distributor upload, every platform profile, every social handle. Variations look harmless and aren't: distributors match releases to artist pages by exact name, and "J4de" versus "J4DE" can create two separate artist profiles, splitting your streams and confusing your algorithmic profile. If it ever happens, your distributor can fix the mapping — but prevention is one decision and a note on your phone.

Two more naming rules. First, before committing to an artist name, search it on every platform; competing with an established act or a common word for your own name is a lifelong tax. Second, never put anything extra in the artist field — no "presented by," no emoji, no year.

Titles: plain, exact, searchable

• Write the title the way a fan would type it. If you sing "Kerosene" they will not find "K3RO$ENE." Stylize your artwork, not your metadata.
• Use the proper fields for versions. "Acoustic," "Remix," and featured artists go in the version and featured-artist fields your distributor provides, not jammed into the title with brackets and improvised punctuation. Platforms parse those fields; they choke on improvisation.
• Match everywhere. The title on streaming, on your video uploads, and in your captions should be character-identical, so every search and every tag points at one thing.

Credits are money and discovery

List every songwriter and producer, with real legal names, on every release. Two reasons. The money one: publishing royalties flow through credited writers, and uncredited collaborators are unpaid collaborators — a fact that has ended more friendships than any creative dispute I ever witnessed at the label. The discovery one: platforms increasingly surface credits, and producers and writers get followed. Your correct credit on someone else's song is a doorway into your catalog.

While you're at it: register with a performing rights organization, and get your lyrics onto the platforms' lyric systems through your distributor or the major lyric services. Synced lyrics keep listeners inside the song — and completion is a signal you want.

Genre and mood tags: honest wins

When your distributor asks for genres and moods, resist tagging aspirationally. Tags route your song to editors, radio-style algorithms, and listeners with specific appetites. A dreamy bedroom-pop song tagged "hip-hop" gets tested on hip-hop listeners, who skip it, teaching the system your song fails. Accurate and modest beats ambitious and wrong.

Video metadata counts too

Wherever your clips live, the same logic applies: exact song title and artist name in the video title, a first line of description that says what the song is and links where to stream it. When you export a clip from Volmix to your platforms, that thirty seconds of typing is the difference between a viral video fans can trace to your song and one they can't.

The fifteen-minute audit

Tonight: search your artist name on two platforms, check your releases show one artist page, verify credits on your last release, and confirm titles match everywhere. Fifteen minutes. Some careers have quietly leaked for years over less.