How Record Labels Deliver to Every DSP at Once: The Centralised Distribution Pipeline

Spotify will not rewrite your metadata for you. Apple Music will not either. Once a track is live, the store applies what the distributor sent. Fixes travel as another delivery, not as a form on the artist dashboard.

A label that wants Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, Deezer, TIDAL and the rest is not operating a stack of dashboards. It submits one release: lossless masters, artwork, titles, a 12-character ISRC on each recording, a UPC on the product, territories, and a street date. The distributor validates that packet, encodes it, and sends a DDEX Electronic Release Notification to each selected outlet.

Fan-out is the product. What follows is the path that packet takes, the message format that carries it, and the two jobs that keep producing more messages after street date: updates and takedowns.

An independent label gets its music on Spotify through a distributor. That is Spotify’s own advice, because the distributor is the party that delivers the release to Spotify and later pays out the streaming royalties it earns. Going live can then take up to five business days.

Before submitting, have four things ready:

• Lossless masters in WAV or FLAC.
• Square cover art of at least 3000 × 3000 pixels in RGB, with no promotional text, URLs or social handles.
• An ISRC for each track and a UPC for the release. LabelGrid provides both at no extra cost if you have none.
• A release date at least two weeks out, and three to four weeks if you can, so review and Spotify’s own processing both fit.

LabelGrid is the distributor in that chain. Spotify’s Provider Directory lists it as a Spotify Preferred Provider for delivery. LabelGrid reviews the release, sends Spotify the feed described below along with every other store you select, and shows each store’s delivery status. Once the first release is live, request access to the artist’s Spotify for Artists profile. From then on you can pitch one unreleased song per release to editorial playlists at least seven days before release day. The Spotify guide in the help centre has the full specs.

Copying the same zip to every store would fail on contact. Each digital service provider (DSP) publishes its own audio floor and its own identifier rules, and the deal terms you declare differ from store to store. The commercial window for France is not the commercial window for Japan. Artwork that is valid at 3000 pixels still has to be declared as an Image resource in the message, not dumped in a folder and hoped for.

The distributor sits between the rightsholder and those destinations. For a record label, that means one catalog, one set of ISRCs and UPCs, and a per-outlet send. LabelGrid’s distribution flow is built around that: pick outlets (Select All is the default, or tick and untick by store), submit, then follow each destination’s status: Queued, Delivering, Delivered, Live, Error or Scheduled. Your label name and artist name are what the stores display. LabelGrid does not stamp “distributed by LabelGrid” over them.

Fan-out is also not a single clock. Stores ingest at different speeds. A staggered go-live across platforms in the first few days is normal. LabelGrid’s published floor is to submit at least two weeks before street date, with three to four weeks the better window, because quality review and the DSP’s own processing both sit on that calendar. Delivery times are not guaranteed. LabelGrid’s review takes up to 10 business days on Solo, Basic and Pro plans and up to 5 on Custom and API. After delivery, Apple Music typically processes a release in 1 to 3 business days; the others vary.

DDEX, IFPI and GS1 publish the wiring. A distribution platform is the machine that runs it.

1. Ingest: audio masters, cover art, and the release metadata land in one catalog.
2. Identifier and metadata checks. Every recording needs an ISRC, the saleable product needs a UPC or EAN (a GS1 GTIN), and nothing is built until structure, completeness and uniqueness pass.
3. Transcoding turns the lossless master into the file each destination expects, after which the DSP transcodes again for its own playback tiers.
4. DDEX delivery packs release metadata, resource references and deal terms into an ERN and sends it.
5. Acknowledgement: the DSP returns a status, including errors, so the sender can prove the message was received.
6. Usage reporting. Sales and streams travel back, typically as a DDEX Digital Sales Report, and feed royalty payment.

On LabelGrid-deal deliveries, a quality review runs before step four. That is the point where silence padding or a rights flag stops a feed that would otherwise bounce at the store. The dashboard statuses above are the operator view of steps four and five, not a second standard.

The message that actually leaves the building is a DDEX ERN NewReleaseMessage. DDEX describes it as the way a record company or distributor tells a DSP what is being made available and on what terms. Resources (a SoundRecording, an Image, a Video) live in one list. Releases live in another. Deal terms live in a third. References stitch them together: resource A1 is the audio for release R1. The ISRC sits on the recording. The UPC sits on the product.

That would be a solved problem if every DSP spoke the same dialect. They do not. The most recent published version is ERN 4.3.2. DDEX strongly advises implementers to use 4.3.x. DDEX stopped supporting ERN 3 on 1 March 2025, and Spotify stopped accepting ERN versions older than 4.3 on 1 April 2026. Each DSP decides which ERN versions it accepts, so the version a feed carries still depends on the store.

ERN 4 is not a cosmetic bump. A PartyList gathers musicians, writers and labels once instead of repeating them through the file. Territory fields only repeat where they actually differ. A 10-track album becomes one Release plus ten lightweight TrackRelease composites rather than eleven full releases. DisplayArtistName (the marketing brand) is separate from Contributor (the role). The 4.3 update, published in December 2022, added immersive-audio data, authorisation for user-generated short clips, album visibility dates, and hooks into DDEX’s MEAD and PIE enrichment standards.

You do not need to join the DDEX consortium to send any of this. An Implementation Licence is enough. LabelGrid implements ERN 3.8.2, 4.3.0, 4.3.1 and 4.3.2 and is not a consortium member. Each store receives the version it accepts. The mechanics of that send, including takedowns as a PurgeReleaseMessage, are on the DDEX delivery page.

Spotify prefers FLAC and accepts WAV. It wants 44.1 kHz or higher, and 24-bit when that is the native master (16-bit only if no higher-bit-depth master exists). It also says to send that native stereo master and not to downsample it first. Files below 16-bit or 44.1 kHz get upconverted and lose lossless playback eligibility.

Apple Digital Masters wants the original 24-bit PCM master. Do not upsample. Do not bit-pad a 16-bit file into 24-bit. Apple’s encoder uses the extra resolution; a padded file does not grow any.

LabelGrid accepts only WAV or FLAC at upload. A 24-bit master has to arrive as WAV. FLAC above 16-bit is rejected. Automated review also caps leading silence at five seconds and trailing silence at nine.

ERN is not a one-shot. Metadata corrections, artwork swaps, territorial changes and removals are further messages on the same choreography, confirmed the same way. Spotify is explicit: it will not edit a live release’s metadata or artwork for you. The label or distributor sends an update feed.

The identifiers do not get a second life. An ISRC stays with that recording for its life; IFPI’s rule is that you do not reuse it. A GTIN allocated to a trade item after December 2018 is not reallocated, so an updated product keeps its UPC. If the recording itself is materially new, that is a new ISRC. If the UPC on Apple was wrong, Apple’s partner docs say the product has to be removed and resent; Apple will not delete the code.

A takedown is a request to stop trading the release. DDEX gives two shapes for that: a NewReleaseMessage that omits the deal, or a dedicated PurgeReleaseMessage. It stops availability. It does not invent a new identity for the recording. On Spotify the removal takes at least two business days, and the track goes grey and unplayable rather than vanishing.

Create an account at app.labelgrid.com. New artist and label registrations include a 7-day free trial. A card is taken at signup and is not charged during those seven days. You can learn the catalog during the trial. You cannot distribute until the account is on a paid plan and KYC is complete. LabelGrid is listed as a Spotify Preferred Provider in the delivery-platform category, which is the same ingest path this piece has been describing.

Build a release, keep Select All unless you have a reason to drop a store, and submit at least two weeks out. The step-by-step is in the distribution help overview, with calendars on the lead times page. The ERN send itself is documented on the DDEX delivery page above.