Music distribution process

Posted on Posted in Music

Our Process

Once you initially submit your release, it will be queued for packing to prepare it for delivery to partners. As soon as the release has completed packing, we review the content in the order that it was submitted. Our team approves releases daily, Monday through Friday. Each release is carefully reviewed, inspected, and screened to ensure that it meets distribution guidelines to the partners that we deliver to. Release approvals typically take 5 business days, not including holidays or weekends. Once it’s approved, you will receive a system email notifying you of this, and from there, your release should be delivered and processed on all partners in 1-10 days.

Submitting Early

We recommend that all record labels and artists deliver their releases with 4-6 weeks of lead time. This is because some retailers or streaming providers may have server related issues or problems that we cannot control that may impact your release date. Also, in the case of Apple, they typically require a product to be delivered at least 10 full business days (not including weekends and holidays) prior to the release date, and often your product may not show live until 10 full business days (not including weekends and holidays) has passed.

If your release was submitted with 10 full business days (not including weekends and holidays) and it is still not live, please feel free to create a request, and we’ll inspect the matter.

Lastly, the most important reason you need to send in a release 4-6 weeks in advance is to ensure that your product can be recognized and marketed by the retailer. Feature and playlist placements are extremely competitive. Symphonic works hard to pitch your releases to our DSPs, and many partners receive thousands of feature requests daily.  

To stand out and increase your chances of getting a featured release, please ensure you submit the release with our suggested lead time! For more information on best practices for release maximization, click here.

I didn’t submit early, what happens now?

If you submitted your release with less than the 4-6 week suggested time, there is still a chance that your release will be live before your release date, but it’s unlikely. It will go live on DSPs as soon as they receive it, process it, and put it up on their platform. Unfortunately, each DSP platform works on its own schedule, and the earliest process/live date will not be the same for each partner. It can take up to 10 days for the release to be live on all partner sites.