Release Migration Essential Information & Best Practices
Best Practices:
Use the exact same UPC and ISRC(s), audio file, artwork, and metadata as when you delivered to your old distributor. This is crucial to ensure the streaming platforms can sync the content properly. Unfortunately, we cannot ever 100% guarantee that every release will sync because this is in the hands of the streaming platforms. But this is best practice on our end!
Do NOT issue a takedown of the release on the old distributor until Venice Content Ops has verified that the release migration has successfully merged the release across platforms.
Duplicates: After you deliver your release to Venice, duplicates will appear on some streaming platforms. The overlap period is to ensure the old and new release sync properly. After the takedown from the old distributor, these duplicates will then disappear.
Spotify:
Stream counts of the release may not match temporarily while the migration is in progress. Do not worry, this behavior is normal and will resolve itself in time.
Spotify may send anyone who is tied to the artist's Spotify for Artists account an email that they have a "new release" coming. Please advise those artists to disregard this notification while release migration is in progress.
Apple Music/iTunes:
Apple recommends taking screenshots of current content that is live to capture features, playlists, etc. as backup. If you have a Label Relations Rep, we recommend notifying them of the migration, so they can also keep an eye out.
iTunes ratings/reviews will be lost unfortunately. Luckily, there's not too many people on iTunes downloads as before!
SoundCloud:
Before your label or distributor delivers content to your SoundCloud profile, SoundCloud will search, by ISRC, for any matching tracks which may already exist on your account. If an ISRC, that is already live on the platform, matches with a feed delivered one, the manually uploaded version of that track can be turned into the supply chain version, resulting in one single master copy of each track.
Video Migration
YouTube Art Tracks - View counts on "Art Tracks" unfortunately will be reset, since YouTube will essentially create a new YouTube URL for the newly delivered art track. Most times, art track views are not as huge of a concern, as the official or lyric video is often the asset that is promoted most by fans.