Contributor Roles (Producer & Songwriter credits)

On digital platforms, you typically see performers, featuring artists, and remixers, while supporting roles may be hidden. Although contributor roles aren’t considered for top billing on a release or song, digital music providers have begun to support or require these roles for credits and proper attribution.

Producers, songwriters, drummers, mastering engineers, and other roles you would find in traditional liner notes are the types of roles supported in this feature. Very few partners currently support these roles (notably Spotify & Apple), but we encourage clients to fill out as much information as possible when creating releases.

More partners will utilize these rules and may require them in the future to properly submit a release on their platform. Adding these roles to your releases now may have benefits for how your release displays in the future.

We categorize contributors in the following groups:

Writers

• Those that contribute to the writing and composition of a recording/work. Songwriter, composer, lyricist, etc.

Performers

• Those that actively perform on the recording either as an individual or part of a group. Guitarist, keyboards, drums, etc.

Production & Engineering

• Those that work behind the scenes finalizing and shaping the overall recording to be ready for consumption. Producer, mastering engineer, graphic design, etc.

Spotify

Spotify supports showing Producer & Songwriter credits on their releases.

Apple

In the future Apple will require a contributor provided per contributor group for every track: Writers, Performers, and Production & Engineering. As of now we recommend you begin to provide these roles to build the habit so when enforcement comes it won't be a hurdle for you or your team.

Apple requires specific roles to be provided when submitting content within certain genres:

Jazz - For any content with primary genre Jazz and secondary genre Jazz (the genre used for classic Jazz),  each instrumental performer must be credited on each track using contributor roles. Include the instrumental roles of primary and featuring artists as well as any studio musicians. For example, Miles Davis would be credited as both the primary artist and the Trumpet contributor role.

Technical Personnel and Other Contributor Roles

Non-performing Contributing roles, such as Producer, Recording Engineer, or Graphic Designer should not be credited as the Primary artist.

Where to use these roles

These roles are selected on the track level under the Tracks section. You can add as many roles as you need to properly attribute a song.