About this section

In this section, you need to create artist profiles in stores or find them if they already exist. This is a particularly important step in release creation: whether your release appears correctly on the artist’s page in the store depends on how accurately this section is filled out. If you make a mistake, your release may be incorrectly assigned to another artist’s catalog.

At the moment, you only need to set up profiles for three stores — Apple Music (iTunes), Beatport, and Spotify. Additionally, when delivering to certain services like Facebook (Instagram) and SoundCloud, you must specify a Spotify artist profile, even if you don’t plan to deliver to Spotify itself. We explain this in more detail in the article Why some stores are unavailable.

Please note that profiles must be specified for all release participants — both artists and contributors. Contributor profiles won’t appear in store search results, but they’re still required — for example, for rights societies.

Shops Summary table content

Each row represents a music store where you must explicitly link the release to an artist. To the right of each column header, there's a tooltip you can hover over to read more about what each profile category means in detail. The goal of this section is to ensure that, by the end, the number in the column "Selected Artist Profiles" equals the total number of artists and contributors involved in the release. Meanwhile, the other columns should contain zeros, and the Status column should say "OK".

Creating and selecting an artist profile in Apple Music (iTunes)

To begin, double-click on the store name in the table. A new table will open, showing a list of all participants of your release — including both main artists and contributors. For each of them, you must select the corresponding profile in the store — in this case, Apple Music (iTunes).

To select a profile, click on the name of the release participant. This will open a third table where you'll need to configure the profile source.

This table will contain 4 rows:

• Manually selected for this release — the artist profile in the store will be linked to this artist name only for this specific release.
• Received from shop release record — this row is not editable; it’s automatically filled after the release has been delivered to the store.
• Default page for this artist for this label — the artist profile in the store will be linked to this artist name for this release and all future releases under this label.
• Default page for this artist for any label — the artist profile in the store will be linked to this artist name for this release and all future releases under any label.

The rows are listed in this specific order for a reason: a profile manually selected for the release has the highest priority, while a profile set as default for any label has the lowest.

Click the green button in the far-right column of the appropriate row to proceed with searching for or creating an artist profile.

If your artist name is common or widely used, you’ll see a table with many other artists sharing that name. If you see your exact profile in the list, click on the name and then click “Select”.

If you haven’t created a profile yet, click the “Create” button in the bottom left corner of the window.

To create an artist profile, simply enter the artist’s name, select the native language, and click “Create profile”.

In the next window, you’ll need to choose whether to save this profile as the default for all labels, only for this label, or just for this release — then click “OK”.

You’ll then need to repeat the same steps for all other artists and contributors in the release across all remaining stores.