Short Answer: You can change your artist name on all services except iTunes/Apple Music by visiting your album page, and clicking “Edit Release”. You can even edit your artist name on all of your releases from a single album edit request!***
Long Answer: Changing your artist name is a long and arduous process that can occasionally cause more issues than it solves, and not all services allow rebranding to take place. Obviously, we all understand artist expression and wanting to most accurately represent yourself and your artist project, but we also want to make sure that you have all the information you need to make the most informed decision possible before making a change to your existing projects that is difficult to reverse and can cause a lot of issues. Apple Music is not currently accepting rebranding requests. You can find more information on that here.
Things to keep in mind:
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Artist name edits and/or rebrands can only be requested on releases that are currently live
Streaming services do not allow releases that have already been submitted to be resubmitted with differing metadata (Artist Name and Track Titles). In order to resubmit any release that has already been listed in streaming services, it must be resubmitted with the original Artist Name and Track Titles.
If you have deleted your work in an effort to edit or rebrand your Artist Name, note that the only way to do so, is to re-upload your work with the original metadata, and then request an edit on that re-uploaded work once it has been resubmitted to streaming services. -
Preserving followers and monthly listeners
When you make a request to change your artist name, please note that most streaming services will simply create a new artist page for you instead of updating the information on your existing artist page. For streaming services that do this, we cannot request that your existing artist page be edited to reflect your new artist name. As a result, your monthly listeners and followers will likely not be transferred to your new artist page. -
Preserving play counts and playlists
DistroKid cannot make any guarantees, but in general if you are simply editing the metadata of an existing release through our edits feature (i.e. not changing the ISRC), your play counts and playlist placements should carry over. Again though, not something DistroKid has any control over. -
It can take quite some time for all stores to update your artist name
While submitting your request to rebrand is an automated process, the actual data management and metadata updates of your rebrand request are not fully automated, and many of these requests require humans (not computers) to fulfill correctly.
What this means:
Depending on the volume of current rebrand requests, it may take up to a couple of weeks for all stores to update your existing content and display your new artist name. If you are planning on rebranding, please take note of this.
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Mis-mapped releases
As you may know, DistroKid does not have any control over where your releases are mapped in streaming services. When you edit your artist name and a new artist page is created, if the name is not completely unique it is possible that your releases will be mapped to a pre-existing artist page. If this happens, please visit https://www.distrokid.com/fixer, where we'll walk you through getting things fixed up! -
Unable to make additional edit requests
If you decide to change your artist name across streaming services, you will not be able to request additional edit requests on any release that utilizes the new artist name until your name change request has been completed. At this time, there is no way to expedite these requests -
No going back (kind of)
If you choose to change your artist name, the only way to revert the changes is to re-request another edit. Any side effects of the initial request are not guaranteed to be resolved by simply changing your artist name back. (It’s a big decision yo!!) 🧠
***It is important to note that when rebranding, your full discography must be updated to reflect the new artist name, otherwise some streaming services may hide releases they deem to have conflicting metadata.
Best practice: update your artist name across your releases by using the included "Update all of my [Artist Name] releases to use the new artist name" tool in the edit release section. Note at this time this tool is only available for releases with one primary artist (not a collaboration).
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