Unchained Music Distribution passport
- Platform
- Gracenote
- Site
- gracenote.com
To get your credits onto Gracenote, distribute through Unchained Music. Your metadata travels with the release, which typically goes live within 24 hours to 7 days.
Gracenote is the music metadata database that car infotainment systems, media players and connected devices query to display track names, artists, album art and genre. Delivery there means your release shows up correctly wherever that database is consulted.
Gracenote, a Nielsen company headquartered in Emeryville, California, maintains metadata on more than 100 million tracks and supplies it to consumer platforms worldwide, including the infotainment systems in hundreds of millions of vehicles. When a listener plays your album from a file, a disc or a connected car, the display pulls titles, credits and artwork from databases like Gracenote's. If your release is not in there, the dashboard shows Unknown Artist. The old do it yourself route, submitting track names through a desktop media player, has effectively retired along with iTunes, so distributor delivery is now the practical way in. Send your release through Unchained Music and the metadata that travels with it, titles, credits, artwork, genre and identifiers, is delivered to Gracenote as part of the release.
The same four steps for every release, whichever stores you send it to.
Sign up and pick the plan that fits. Grow is one artist profile, Pro is three and adds editorial pitching.
Audio, artwork and the metadata that travels with them: titles, credits, release date and rights.
Select your stores and send the release to all of them in one go.
A person checks the release before it leaves. It typically appears on the platform within 24 hours to 7 days.
Updated September 2026
Five questions, answered for this platform specifically.
Gracenote is one of the largest music metadata providers in the world, with data on more than 100 million tracks. Car makers, media player software and connected devices license its database so that when music plays, the screen can show the correct track name, artist, album, artwork and genre.
The legacy route was submitting CD track names through iTunes, which is no longer a realistic path. Today the reliable way in is through a distributor that delivers metadata to Gracenote. Release through Unchained Music and your titles, credits and artwork are sent as part of the delivery, with no separate submission to manage.
Car infotainment systems identify music by looking it up in metadata databases such as Gracenote. If your release has never been delivered there, the lookup finds nothing and the display falls back to Unknown Artist and Track 01. Delivering your release with full metadata fixes that at the source.
Gracenote does not charge rights holders to carry their metadata; it earns from licensing the database to device and platform companies. Your only task is getting accurate data in, which happens automatically when your release is delivered by a distributor that feeds Gracenote.
The database entry is created when your release is delivered, but consumer devices update on their own schedules. Connected systems refresh faster than offline ones, and in car databases in particular can lag behind, so allow time between delivery and seeing your titles appear on every dashboard.
Set the release up in the app and it goes to this platform with the rest of them, delivered to spec and checked by a person first.
Upload the release yourself in the app, on the plan that fits, and send it to every store you want in one go.
Start DIYFor multi-release plans and label rosters, scoped with the services team before anything starts.
Apply for Artist & Label Services