Metadata Checklist

Metadata like ISRC codes and songwriter credits is easy to treat as paperwork, but it's what actually routes royalties to the right people and what streaming platforms use to match a track to sync licensing requests years later. Featured artists specifically need to be tagged as metadata, not just written into the title — a title-only credit doesn't get that artist proper attribution or plays counted toward their own profile.

• •UPC and genre both feed how the release gets categorized and discovered — a missing UPC can complicate matching sales data back to the release, and a mismatched genre tag sends it toward the wrong recommendation audience entirely.
• •The explicit flag is worth setting deliberately rather than accepting a distributor's default, since it decides whether the track gets filtered out of clean playlists and radio-style stations entirely.