Metadata is all the information attached to your release — track title, artist name, any featured artists, genre, release date, and your writer and producer credits. It's the least exciting part of putting music out, but it's the part that decides whether you get found, credited and paid correctly. Get it wrong and you can end up with your tracks split across two Spotify profiles or royalties you never see. Getting it right is mostly about being careful and consistent.

A few specific things matter. Your ISRC (International Standard Recording Code) is a unique ID for each individual recording — it's how plays and sales are tracked back to you for royalties. Your distributor usually generates these for free, and every distinct recording, including remixes and edits, needs its own. The UPC is the barcode for the overall release, also typically supplied by your distributor. Keep your artist name spelled identically everywhere so all your music lands on one profile, and register your songwriting credits with your PRO (PRS in the UK) so you collect on the composition as well as the recording.

Then there's tagging — embedding the metadata directly into your audio files so the title, artist, genre, key, BPM and artwork travel with the track. This matters most for the promo files you send to DJs, labels and curators, and for DJ stores like Beatport. A clean, fully tagged file looks professional and makes life easy for the people you want playing your music; an untitled WAV with no artwork looks like a demo. Sort all of this before you submit, because fixing it after release is far more painful than getting it right first time.