Live in 1 business day
Your release is checked by a human and delivered to Apple Music within one business day.
Distribute your music to Apple Music and iTunes, delivered with correct metadata and artwork and live in one business day.
To get your music on Apple Music, distribute through Unchained Music. Releases typically go live within 24 hours to 7 days.
Your release is checked by a human and delivered to Apple Music within one business day.
You keep everything Apple Music pays out. No cut taken on your streams.
Artwork, credits and metadata delivered to Apple Music spec the first time.
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 Apple Music at store selection, along with everywhere else you want the release to land.
A person checks the release before it leaves. It typically appears on the platform within 24 hours to 7 days.
Updated August 2026
Five questions, answered for this platform specifically.
Apple Music ingests new releases through approved distributors that deliver audio, artwork, and metadata in Apple’s required formats. Once received, Apple runs automated and manual checks to verify quality, rights ownership, and guideline compliance before making the music available to users globally.
Apple Music expects high resolution audio files, clean metadata, and square cover art that meets size and content guidelines. Issues such as low quality images, mismatched titles, or copyright concerns can delay or block a release during Apple’s validation process.
Yes. Changes such as correcting metadata, updating artwork, or modifying territories are done through the artist’s distributor. Apple applies those updates after reprocessing the delivery, ensuring the corrected information replaces the previous version without impacting streams or playlist placements.
Apple provides Apple Music for Artists, a dashboard where musicians can track streams, listener demographics, playlist activity, and Shazam data. Access is granted once the artist verifies their identity and claims their profile, giving insight into how their music performs across the Apple ecosystem.
Apple Music allows clean, explicit, acoustic, remastered, and alternate versions as long as each version is correctly labeled and uniquely identified through metadata and ISRCs. Explicit releases must follow Apple’s content guidelines to ensure parental controls and regional restrictions function correctly.
