Artist Roles & Credits
Main artist, featuring, composer, producer — and why exact name matching is the difference between your profile and someone else's.
Credits control where your music lands
Credits are not vanity. Credits tell DSPs which artist profiles, playlist systems, and royalty paths belong to your release. Get one name wrong by a single character and a platform can route your track to the wrong artist page, which turns a clean release into a metadata problem.
Role types
Use the correct role for every credited person on a track. These four roles are the ones platforms commonly display and use when organizing release metadata.
- Main Artist — the primary performer on the track
- Composer/Songwriter — wrote the music and or lyrics
- Featuring Artist — guest appearance or collaboration
- Producer — produced the track
Exact name matching
Names must be entered EXACTLY as they appear on DSPs. If Spotify shows Andrés López but your metadata says Andres Lopez without the accent, Spotify can index the track to the wrong artist profile entirely. Accents, capitalization, and punctuation all matter. This is the difference between your release appearing correctly everywhere and spending weeks fixing metadata issues.
Where to add roles
Add roles in the Artist field on each track during upload. Enter every credited name exactly as it appears on the relevant platform, then assign the correct role for that track.
Complete all required credit fields for every track before submitting the release. Missing credits do not only look incomplete — they can affect how DSPs display, categorize, and connect your release to the right artist profiles.