When creating a release with MusicHub, it is not a simple matter of clicking the 'Submit' button and then seeing your release appear on the streaming platforms. Your release must first be checked and processed before it can go live - and this takes some time. As a result, there are a couple important factors to take into account of when planning your release.
The 14 day processing period
The first factor to be aware of is that, at MusicHub, every release is required to go through a 14 day processing period. This allows us to make sure that your release is 100% ready to be published and thereby avoid any issues that might arise when it finally goes live on the streaming platforms.
Accordingly, when setting up your release, the earliest release date you can choose (in Step 4 of the release setup) is 14 days after the day that you submit your release. When looking at the calendar to select a release date, the coming two weeks will be greyed out and only dates after that time frame will be available to be selected.
For this reason, it is recommended to choose a release date which is more than 14 days in the future. The reason for this is that, should your release require corrections, when resubmitting after making those corrections you will again only be able to choose a release date starting at 14 days after your resubmission.
Quality Control
The second factor to be aware of is that every release at MusicHub must pass through a quality control check. In this time, the metadata and artwork for your release are manually checked by the Quality Control team and the audio files are automatically scanned for copyrighted material and other issues.
If there is any part of your release that needs to be corrected, your release will be sent back to you for editing. Should this happen you will receive an email notifying you that your release has been rejected, and in the release details you will then find details of what needs to be corrected. If anything is unclear you can simply contact MusicHub customer support for further explanation.
Important: Whenever a release requires correction, once any corrections have been made and the release is resubmitted, it enters the processing period from the start. This means that the 14 day processing period is reset and that the release will go through the Quality Control process again.
If there is nothing to be corrected, your release will be given the 'Approved' status and you will receive and email notifying you of this. Once your release has been approved we will start delivering it to the streaming platforms.
This Quality control process - from submission to either approval or rejection - takes roughly two working days. So if you submit your release on a Monday your release should be approved or rejected by the Wednesday. But if you submit on a Friday, the quality control process will only be complete by the following Tuesday.
Please Note: when checking releases, our Quality Control team are doing so against the stricter of the style guides that have been set out by the streaming platforms. The reason for this is that on the platforms with the strictest policies (such as Apple Music), any rejection of a release due to incorrect formatting has a negative impact on the quality of service granted to all MusicHub releases on that platform. Since it is not possible to send different formatting to different platforms, we have decided that our style guide will always adapt to the guidelines of the strictest streaming platforms.
Classical Releases
The formatting for classical releases is much more complicated than for non-classical releases and so they have to be checked by a specialist. Classical releases can therefore take up to 4 weeks to be processed, regardless of the release date that has been selected.