Metadata Is the Product: The 14-Field AI Music Release Checklist

Honest AI disclosure has not cost us a single stream. Bad metadata has cost us releases. Since 16 April 2026 Spotify has shown AI credits in the song-info panel whenever a distributor passes the DDEX AI disclosure field, and DistroKid was the first partner wired to it. Spotify's stated position since September 2025 is that disclosed AI involvement is not penalised or down-ranked. In the same breath it reported removing more than 75 million spam tracks in a year through a filter that targets mass uploads, duplicated titles, artificially short tracks and SEO stuffing in metadata. Two systems, two outcomes, and the thing that decides which one you meet is the form you fill in before you press upload.

Short answer: treat release metadata as part of the product, not paperwork. Fourteen fields decide whether a track matches to its writers, clears distributor AI declarations, survives spam filters and gets paid on every store that still pays. The checklist below is the gate every release passes in the catalogues we run. Build it around one track that once failed, and you will never skip it again.

The two-system map

Read the left column again. Only one of those six systems cares whether you used AI. The other five care whether you are honest, whether you are a person, and whether your upload behaviour looks like a farm. Metadata is how you answer all three before anyone asks.

The 14-field pre-upload gate

1. Primary artist name matches the profile exactly, including case and diacritics. Variants create duplicate profiles, and duplicate profiles look like a farm.
2. Featured artists listed as separate credits, never baked into the title with "feat." in brackets.
3. Title is a title. No keywords, no "(Lofi Chill Beats to Study)", no version tags unless it is a version. Title stuffing is named in Spotify's spam criteria.
4. Version field used for edits, instrumentals and remixes, so the title stays clean and the version is machine-readable.
5. ISRC assigned by the distributor per recording and copied into your works sheet the same day.
6. ISWC and writer splits for the composition, registered with your performing rights society. The distributor does not do this for you; see the two royalty pipes.
7. Writer and composer credits as real names with roles: lyricist, composer, producer. "Various" and blank fields are how income disappears into the unmatched pool.
8. Performer credits including the vocalist, and if the vocal is a disclosed clone of your voice, you.
9. AI disclosure per component: vocals, instrumentation, lyrics, post-production. This is the field that becomes the Spotify AI credit. Tick what is true. Do not tick "fully AI-generated" for a track you wrote and sang over; that is the TIDAL zero-royalty category.
10. Generator disclosure where the distributor asks. Since April 2026, Believe and TuneCore block tracks from generators they treat as unlicensed and have since opened distribution to tracks from Suno's new industry partner model while older-model tracks stay blocked. Record the model version in your provenance file so you can answer precisely.
11. Language and explicit flags correct per track. Wrong language tags break editorial placement and lyric matching; wrong explicit flags get tracks pulled.
12. Genre and sub-genre chosen from the taxonomy, not invented. Two levels is enough; five genres on one track is a stuffing pattern.
13. Artwork that is not a photoreal generated face presented as the artist, carries no text that duplicates the title, and meets the store's size rules. Faces are the AI Persona trigger covered in the identity stack.
14. Release date and cadence that a human could plausibly sustain. One account releasing daily is the shape in UMG's complaint against DistroKid, which cites 4,562 tracks from a single "Lofi Chill" act in twelve months.